Downtime
by blackberet
Summary: KotOR 1. A series of stories about the crew of the Ebon Hawk and their interactions with each other as they journey to find the Star Forge. FemRevan. Some Revan/Carth, but the gang's all here.
1. Trust

A/N: I've thought about writing a full novelization of the game, but there are so many excellent ones out there that it seemed superfluous. Instead, I'm writing a series of KotOR short stories that would be some of the extra scenes in my novelization, going beyond the game script to have some fun with the characters and their interactions. I hope you enjoy.

Obviously, I don't own KotOR or these characters. Our narrator is a woman, (mostly) light side; her name, appearance, and character classes are whatever you'd like them to be.

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"Trust" (Carth)

Taris

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"Out cold." Carth nudged one of the passed-out Siths' legs with the toe of his boot, not gently. "Makes you wonder how these slobs managed to take over half the galaxy."

"These are only junior officers. Maybe the brass are better at holding their liquor," I replied.

"One of them, at least," he muttered grimly.

I waited to see if he was going to elaborate. Apparently he wasn't. "Good thing these guys are lightweights, though. If Grabby over there had tried to make friends with me one more time, I wouldn't have been responsible for my actions," I said, stepping over another one of them on my way to the dresser. All that contempt from the locals must really be getting to them; three hours and a few bottles of Tarisian ale and not one of the Sith partygoers was conscious. Which left just me and Carth, and we were only here for the uniforms. Some party.

"I don't know. You looked like you were having a pretty good time to me."

I jerked the top drawer open with more force than necessary. "Well, I wasn't getting a lot of help from my wingman, that's for sure. We were supposed to be keeping them drinking, not standing around all night looking like we'd rather gouge our eyes out with a vibroblade than dance."

"Forgive me if I'm not exactly eager to spend my time hitting on a bunch of Sith."

"Hopefully you won't have to, now that we've got this." While he was griping, I'd hit the jackpot. I tossed him the Sith helmet, followed by the rest of the uniform Yun or Jun or whatever his name was had been too lazy to lock up. "Here, try the armor on."

"This had better work on that guard. Damn thing practically makes my skin crawl just holding it."

He glared as he set the helmet down. Was he still accusing me of something here? "Hey, I don't like them any better than you do," I shot back defensively. He was too busy undoing his chest plate to reply, or maybe he just didn't want to get into it. I held my hand out for the plate as he stripped it off. It was still warm.

For lack of anything better to do while Carth played dress-up, I searched the rest of the room. I'd been hoping to find a set of Sith armor that might fit me, but there wasn't one; it looked like I'd have to pretend to be Carth's prisoner or slave or meat shield, whatever. In fact, there wasn't much or anything except a pile of empty bottles and, in one corner, a puddle of regurgitated ale. The nice thing to do would've been to roll them all onto their sides so they didn't choke themselves if they got sick, but I figured that every Sith who died of alcohol poisoning would be one fewer Sith who'd be trying to kill us later.

"It fits," Carth announced. I turned back to see a Sith trooper in full body armor. Hearing his voice come out, oddly tinny, was eerie. "Little tight in the shoulders, but it'll work long enough to get us down there. Now can I change back? I don't want to spend any longer in this—this thing than I have to."

"Permission granted, soldier." Like I had any power to give him orders. I flashed him a small smile to let him know I appreciated his taking one for the team. He started taking off the armor, which I loaded piece by piece into a spare knapsack. We'd have to watch out for these creeps at the Cantina now, especially Wandering Hands, but I didn't consider that a big loss to my social life.

When he was dressed again, he raked a hand through his hair in obvious relief and reached for the knapsack. After a momentary struggle of chivalry, or maybe rank, I let him shoulder it. "All right," he said. "Let's get back to the apartment. We can head down to the Lower City tomorrow."

"Oh, so all of a sudden you're asking me to come home with you? Pretty bold for a guy who didn't even dance with me once."

The crack had its intended effect: he quirked an amused eyebrow at me. It hadn't taken long to figure out that friendly ribbing worked well with him, at the right moments. "I don't think you could even walk in a straight line without me," he said.

"Oh, come on, I had one ale all night. I'm barely even tipsy." Mostly true. Sort of.

"Sure. Well, it did get us a uniform," he said as we started the walk back to the hideout, "so I'll let you lean on me just this once. But let's not make a habit of this, all right?"

----

I was feeling fairly good by the time we got there, even more so after he let me have the first turn in the refresher. Really, my first conscious day on Taris hadn't been all that bad—a little exploring, a little armor shopping, a little dancing, and a room with a view. Working my hair in the sonic shower, I wondered how Bastila Shan was faring. Staying out of sight, if she was smart. _Not _getting felt up by the Sith, if she was lucky.

When I finished, I put my clothes from the _Spire_ back on and went out to tell Carth it was his turn. He went in and I looked around for something to do, not ready to crash yet. Whatever buzz I'd had from that ale was starting to fade. I set my armor and weaponry out for the morning, then wandered over toward the window.

He wasn't a bad guy, that Carth Onasi, I thought companionably. Seemed competent and dependable. Good head on his shoulders. Fun, even, aside from those minor trust issues. It was only the first day; he probably just needed a little time to get used to working with me. Definitely easy on the eyes, I could admit to myself as a footnote. All in all, there were worse people to get stranded on an alien planet with.

And what a planet. If you've never seen Taris—well, I guess you missed your shot, but the Upper City skyline was incredible at night. Every spire--and there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them—was streaked with long columns of light, the glow of apartments and restaurants and shops. The Sith might have had the place blockaded, but they hadn't shut down the nightlife. I remember feeling oddly connected to the people in all those lit-up rooms, wondering how many other women had stumbled home on the arm of a stranger, wondering whether there was any chance one of those points of light marked where Bastila was, wondering whether this would be a place worth coming back to once the war was over. A lot of things like that that turned out, in the end, to be stupid.

I heard Carth come out of the 'fresher behind me. "What a view," I commented.

"What, Taris, or can you see my reflection in the window?"

"Only one of them's worth commenting on, Onasi, and it's not the one with the permastubble."

"Well, that's the last time I take you to a party."

I made a point of ignoring that one and gestured out at the city. "It's beautiful, isn't it?"

"At least until we've seen what's underneath it, I imagine, if the stories are true." I glanced back; he was looking over my shoulder at the skyline, all those lights, the illuminated walkways and the rounded skyscrapers. "But yes, tonight it's beautiful."

"I guess we're lucky to be around to see it." His reflection nodded, superimposed over the scenery like a ghost. He was wearing his armor—again or still, I wasn't sure which. There was a beat or two of silence, then I ventured, "Thanks again. If you were complaining that much about escorting a slightly tipsy person home from a few minutes away, I can only imagine how much of a pain it must've been to drag me all the way from the crash site."

"That was easier, actually. At least then I was pretty sure you weren't going to burst into drunken song or throw up on my boots."

"Never gonna let me live this down, are you?"

"Not likely, sister." His voice sounded less accusatory than it had earlier, though. He chuckled and walked away from the window. "Better get some sleep. We should get an early start tomorrow."

"Good call." I turned back and actually considered the layout of the apartment with an eye to logistics for the first time. Two beds with the feet facing each other. Perfect. Carth stretched out on the one closest to the door, still wearing the armor.

"You don't have to sleep in your armor," I told him. "Really, no need to worry about my maidenly modesty or whatever. Underwear or whatever's fine if it's more comfortable."

"Oh, so all of a sudden you're trying to get me out of my clothes? Pretty bold for a woman who didn't even want me to walk her home."

"Hey, I was being serious. It just looks uncomfortable. I know we've been joking around, but don't start thinking you're such a sex god that I can't be professional about this."

"Wouldn't dream of it." The smirk dropped away. "But seriously, I'd just prefer to sleep in armor. It's safer that way."

"That door's pretty well-secured. I don't think anyone's—" Midsentence, I realized he wasn't worried about the Sith at all. It was me he didn't trust.

"Don't take it personally," he said, watching the change in my face.

"Wouldn't dream of it," I replied, but the conversation had suddenly gotten a lot less fun. Not to mention that I actually _had_ planned on sleeping in my fleet-issued underwear, and now I didn't have a prayer of it not being awkward.

Well, two could play at the raging trust issues game. I got up and put my armor back on—over my uniform, for extra martyrdom points. Then I lay back down and pulled the covers over myself. It felt awkward. What did he think I was, a Sith spy planning to pump him full of blaster bolts the minute he closed his eyes?

"Night," I said.

"Night," Carth said.

I stared at the ceiling, trying to will myself to be tired. But after slipping in and out of consciousness for days on end, obviously my body was filled up on rest, and I couldn't get to sleep. Even though the armor was light, it was still stiff and uncomfortable, and a joint was digging into my back. For probably the better part of a standard hour I lay there, too disgruntled to sleep and too stubborn to give up on it.

Finally I sat up and glanced over at Carth. His boots were sticking out from the bottom of the blanket, emphasizing just how ridiculous this stupid exercise in paranoia was. His breathing hadn't slowed at all; he was waiting for me to let down my guard before he lowered his. All that banter had just been a thin veneer over this.

He must have been as conscious of my wakefulness as I was of his, but I didn't speak to him. We didn't have anything to say.


	2. Fast Talk and Slick Words

A/N: Part two here, set right after Revan & co. meet with Canderous in the Upper City Cantina and agree to get the codes from the Sith base. The title comes from one of Mission's optional lines: "Like I used to tell my brother—fast talk and slick words don't get the job done."

I don't own KotOR or its characters.

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"Fast Talk and Slick Words" (Mission, Zaalbar, Ensemble)

Taris

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Dinner was pastebread. Again.

"Four times this week?" Mission asked dejectedly. "Not that I'm complaining, but can't we go to the cantina and get something good?"

"I'm sorry, Mission, but we've no idea how much that droid is going to cost us, or what else we might need the credits for. I'm afraid we'll have to eat as inexpensively as possible until we leave the planet," Bastila said. For once I had to agree with her—put together, the five of us had 400 credits to our names, and no way to get food but paying outrageous Tarisian prices for it. The tough thing about being a friend to the downtrodden is that the downtrodden have trouble spotting you a decent meal.

Our lives had fallen into a routine over the last couple of weeks. As soon as the food was gone, Mission issued her usual Pazaak challenge to Carth, who, if he followed their nightly M.O., would play a couple of rounds before (correctly) accusing her of cheating. Mission would inform him that he was a delusional geezer and pretend to sulk for about three standard minutes before turning to Zaalbar, who when playing her cheated just as badly as she did. After a few sets, their game would bear only a nominal resemblance to Pazaak. While all this was going on, I'd fix up our weapons and armor, which I had started to find surprisingly relaxing. Ultimately we'd settle in for the night and Mission, Carth and I would have our standard argument about who should take the beds (Carth, by virtue of being not only the most invested, but also the highest-ranking and the most inclined to sulking, invariably won, if you could call sleeping in a chair winning). Carth would fall asleep in uniform pants and a shirt, which I considered progress, and I would drift off with the goal of not having any more strange dreams about Jedi fighting people in black masks. Bastila still didn't have much to contribute to this routine other than meditating and starting endless, fruitless discussions on how to get off-world. Also, she always got one of the beds.

That night, though, she had a mission. "As charming as this is, the sooner we retrieve those codes from the Sith military base, the sooner we can escape Taris. When are we going to get that droid?" she demanded.

"I'll go right now. It's light out; the place is probably still open." I stood up and reached for my vibroblade. Another five minutes of her oh-so-obvious disapproval and the only place on Taris I'd have any inclination to go would be the cantina. "You'd better stay here so the Sith don't spot you. Want to come, Mission?"

Mission dropped her side deck halfway through the shuffle, scattering cards all over the table; as an afterthought, she pulled a few spares out of her sleeves and set them on top of the pile with a brilliant grin at Carth. Carth gave her a deliberately tolerant look and said, "Just the two of you? Just because it's not dark yet doesn't mean the Exchange and the usual packs of drunks aren't already out, you know."

"Don't get yourself in a twist, gramps," Mission shot back, obviously pleased with herself for co-opting his catchphrase. "Big Z'll come with us, won't you, Zaalbar?" Big Z didn't answer except to head for the door.

"I'd advise against this. I don't agree with it, but a Twi'lek and a Wookiee strolling around the Upper City of Taris are bound to draw unwanted attention," Bastila said. "Which, need I remind you, we can ill afford."

I was starting to get irritated. The droid shop was a ten-minute walk. We were armed to the teeth. Here I was, just trying to get the kid out for a little fresh air, and the two of them were acting like we were going to slather ourselves in rakghoul bait and go lie down in the Undercity. The recruiter never told me this was what I could look forward to in the fleet.

"Look, we're just telling you to be careful is all," Carth said in his placating-the-inexplicably-angry-woman voice. I might've been imagining it, but I thought he was also trying to plead with his eyes; he probably wanted to get a break from our Jedi lord and master as much as I did. _Not a chance, flyboy_. If he was going to back her up on things like this, he deserved whatever he'd have to endure for the next hour.

"Thanks for your advice," I said brightly. "You two have fun while we're gone." _Try not to bother the neighbors with your power struggles_, I wanted to add but didn't. Feeling proud of my developing impulse control, I made for the door before it could crack. Zaalbar was already waiting in the hall.

----

"Geez!" Mission exploded as soon as we were more or less out of earshot of the apartment door. "That Bastila sure is a pain, huh? I didn't think the Jedi were supposed to be that bossy."

Personally, I was getting the feeling that bossiness was the first thing they taught their apprentices. "Maybe they mellow with age."

"Nuh-unh. You know how you're always hearing your face will freeze that way if you frown for too long? If she doesn't lighten up soon, she's gonna get stuck with a shock stick up her butt forever. And then she and that geezer will be perfect for each other."

"His trust issues plus her power trips? They'd eat each other alive," I pointed out, maybe a touch huffily.

"You're being very hard on her," Zaalbar put in. "Being taken by slavers…it's a terrible feeling. It is not surprising that she's trying to feel in charge again. To regain control." It was the first thing he'd said all evening.

Mission and I glanced at each other. Neither of us had thought of it that way before, but we both knew that had been more than an abstract point for Zaalbar. Mission frowned thoughtfully. "Well, when you put it that way, I guess it kinda makes sense. But I still say it wouldn't kill her to let us get some decent food more often."

The main doors slid open and we were out on the streets, which were awash with the pink and gold light of the beginning of the sunset. The Sith had finally gotten around to cleaning up our escape pod earlier that day, and the corner outside the apartment building looked surprisingly empty without the familiar wreckage on it. People rushed by in all directions, but none of them were in such a hurry that they couldn't make time to slow down to stare at us—some out of the corners of their eyes, some openly, with mothers hurrying their gaping children past like we might try to eat them any second. The three of us started walking, pretending by tacit agreement that we didn't notice.

"You know where we're going, right?" Mission asked me. "'Cause I don't have a clue."

"I thought you and Big Z were practically the official Taris tour guides."

"Sure, if you go down a level or two. We didn't really get up to the Upper City much, especially not since the Sith took over and put those guards by the elevators. That guy by the Undercity's a real pushover, but up here…" She shook her head. "Anyway, unless you're a human with a lot of credits, there's not much to do here but get spat on, you know? The shops are the only interesting part."

Mission trailed off, looking beyond the edge of the walkway to the vast cityscape below. "Sure is pretty, though," she said quietly.

"Are you sure you want to leave?"

"No way, you're not getting rid of me! I mean, Zaalbar's life debt's gotta be fulfilled, and where Big Z goes, I go." She started swinging her arms idly as she walked, still staring off into the distance. "But what are we gonna do when we get out of here, anyway?"

Hell if I knew. But I answered, "Well, I did sign on with the Republic fleet, even if my first and only formal assignment ended in fireworks. I guess I'll be escorting Bastila wherever she needs to go, and she or Carth or whoever's in charge this week will give me my marching orders until someone gets around to giving me new ones." Or maybe I'd get stuck forever as part of Bastila's personal entourage, joy of joys.

"So I guess that priss is pretty important, huh?"

"'The key to the whole Republic war effort,' so I hear." Which still begged the question of why she'd specifically wanted me on the Endar Spire. Surely not because of my charm and eagerness to please.

Mission looked like she was about to say something, but if so I never found out what it was, because right then a strange voice snapped, "Well, well, looks who's dirtying up the streets today. An off-worlder, an alien dancing girl and a walking carpet."

One of these days I was really going to have to ask Mission how everyone knew I was an off-worlder, I decided. Maybe I wasn't projecting the Raging Asshole Vibes most of the Upper City natives gave off like a bad smell.

And this one _stank_. Literally (had he been swimming in a tank of Tarisian ale?) and figuratively. A Tarisian noble, with the pricey clothes and the cultivated accent to prove it (maybe _that_ was how everyone knew). His face—arranged in a sneer that looked like it could be his default expression—just begged to be punched, even before he opened his mouth again and said, "I'd hate to be the droid that has to clean up the street behind that thing."

Worst of all, he was directly in our way, and striding closer until we were face-to-face. Actually, since he was a head or two taller than I was, it would be more accurate to say we were face-to-expensively-clad-chest. I didn't like it either way.

"Nice night," I said, trying to brush past him. "We'll just leave you to enjoy it."

He moved to block me. "I'd enjoy it a lot more if I had a Twi'lek girl to dance with me. I like the look of your slave, off-worlder; she'll go well with the décor in my bedroom. How much?"

Zaalbar growled, low in his throat, a sound that would have made the son of a bantha beg for his live anywhere a whole troop of Sith guards on patrol hadn't just come around the corner. A dozen, maybe fifteen of them. Damn, damn, damn. Had he seen them?

"She's not a slave. Also, we're leaving. It'd be a shame for things to get ugly during such a pleasant evening stroll," I said. Just in case he was slow on the uptake, I let my hand casually skim the hilt of my vibroblade.

"Oh, I don't think you want to go anywhere until I say you can leave, and I _really_ don't think you want to threaten me. If you try either—or in fact, if I just decide I don't like your attitude, or your face, or the color of the sky—all I have to do is yell, and every Tarisian citizen on this street, not to mention that entire patrol, will be on you in seconds. If you're lucky, they'll just shoot you right here. Anything's better than getting banished to the Undercity, don't you agree?" He smiled, nothing nice about it.

They were crossing on the other side of the street. If I could just keep him talking until they passed— "You know, I feel it's only fair to warn you that dancing slaves are so passé in the rest of the galaxy these days. If you ever went on vacation with one, you'd be laughed right off the planet! The real intergalactic movers and shakers have moved on to more sophisticated entertainments, like—"

"Nice stalling. But it won't work." Gone was the smarmy smile, replaced by a much more dangerous-looking version of the sneer. "Now leash the carpet, off-worlder, and let's talk price."

At the time I thought it actually was about Mission, but when I looked back on it later, I changed my mind. If he'd just wanted a dancing girl, there were plenty of ways to arrange that on Taris, even during the blockade. What that guy really was after was power: the power to push us around, the power to get whatever he wanted the second he decided he wanted it, the power to feel big even though nothing about him merited it. And that was when I started wishing for some power of my own—the power to crush people like that like bugs.

I hope it's not foreshadowing too much to say that this was to cause me a whole lot of problems down the line.

Mission, who'd been quiet so far, finally exploded. "Keep talking like that and you won't have to worry about what the Sith try to do to us, nerf-herder! The last guy who called Zaalbar a carpet got squashed flatter than one. And I'm nobody's slave, got that?" The stares around us ratcheted up to eleven.

"Really?" Sithspawn smiled again and said in a sing-song voice, "Oh, guards…?" That time he was just bluffing, but when I didn't react he took a deliberately deep breath and got ready to do it again, louder.

We all tensed instinctively. He was right. He wasn't carrying any obvious weapons; Zaalbar could rip his limbs off and reattach his arms where his legs were supposed to be without even breaking a sweat. With luck and an armload of medpacks, the three of us might even be able to take out the patrol. But then we'd be three undesirables covered in blood in the middle of the street when the next guard came by, and we couldn't fight the whole city. And if the Sith ever got around to the asking-questions phase of their shoot-first-ask-questions-later M.O., the answers they'd get would lead them straight back to Bastila.

But if Mission and Zaalbar ran, they might be able to make it to the safety of the Lower City while the Sith were dealing with me. I was right on the verge of launching into some kind of stab-him-and-yell plan when Mission piped up again, loud and clear: "Hey, don't you have better things to do than get on our nerves? Like getting that payment over to Davik before somebody decides to put some holes in you?"

Sithspawn, Zaalbar and I all whipped around in one motion to stare at her. Sithspawn recovered—if that was the word—first and spat, "What are you talking about, you festering little tail-headed brat?"

"We ain't stupid! Your Pazaak deck's practically falling out of your pocket, and with that many cards, you've gotta be a serious gambler. Your clothes look expensive, but that style's been out up here for at least a season, so I figure you've fallen on some pretty tough times lately. But if you've got the credits to run around buying slaves off the street, you must be pretty flush right now. My guess? You borrowed credits from Davik to cover your gambling debts, and you just won big." Mission smirked triumphantly. "And trust me, Davik already knows. That's why he sent us to collect."

_What?_ I shot her the most discreet what-the-hell-are-you-doing look I could manage, but the look she gave me back was as clear as an elbow in the ribs: _play along_. "My friend here's a big-time enforcer for Davik," she continued, jerking a thumb at me. I curled my lip and tried to look the part. "You don't want to mess with her."

"Calo Nord checks under his bed for me at night," I added for effect. Calo Nord had no idea who I was and would probably rather shoot me than find out.

"You're lying! I was told to find the collection agents at Javyar's Cantina!" Sithspawn all but clapped his hands over his mouth when he realized what he'd said. He was starting to panic. I might've felt bad for him if his chest hadn't still been right in my face.

Mission scrambled for an answer. "Oh—r-right now we're just giving you a friendly warning is all. But if we don't call Davik in the next three minutes and tell him you're on the way to Javyar's with the credits, he's gonna put a bounty on your head so big even the Sith'll take a shot at you!"

"He's never going to fall for that," Zaalbar rumbled in Shyriiwook.

"You're right, Big Z. I don't think we should call either," Mission said, cheerfully ignoring what he'd actually said. "That way we'll get first crack at him."

Sithspawn was struggling to regain control of the situation and failing miserably, possibly because he was starting to shake. The Sith guards were half a block past us, and it was clear by then that nobody else on the street was going to get involved. "I'm going," he assured us. "I'm going to the cantina right now, so you can tell Davik that—_please_. You three—you, uh, have a nice evening." And so saying, he took off in such a hurry that he almost knocked Mission down on his way past.

----

We didn't start breathing easily again until he'd disappeared in the direction of the nearest Lower City elevator. Once he was well and truly gone, I finally let my muscles untense. "You saved our backsides there, Mission. I can't believe you could tell he owed Davik money just by looking at him."

Mission preened. "Yeah, well, it's kind of an art form, I guess. I don't mean to brag, but—"

"We saw him pleading with some of Davik's collectors in the Lower City Cantina last week," Zaalbar interrupted.

"Hey, I could've figured it out on my own! Griff taught me everything there is to know about finding a good mark." She went into full-on pout mode, but after a few seconds of sulking she stopped and looked thoughtful. "Huh. I guess he was right. Maybe fast talk and slick words can get the job done once in a while."

"Any day we don't have to gut someone is a good day," I agreed sagely.

The Sith patrol was in the distance by then, and the three of us started off again toward the droid shop. None of us said anything for a few blocks. I think we'd all started watching the passers-by on the street more closely, just waiting for one of the people staring at us to try to start something. Luckily, no one did. But the silence kept getting heavier, and I felt like I needed to say something to break it—apologize on behalf of my species, maybe. "I'm sorry you two had to listen to all that," I said.

Mission waved it off. "Oh, we're not angry, right, Zaalbar? I've got a feeling that real soon, that creep is gonna get what's coming to him, and I'm fine with not being around to see it. It's enough just to know."

Wow, that was almost suspiciously mature of her. "Has Bastila been getting to you with all that 'there is no emotion' mumbo-jumbo she keeps muttering about?" I asked.

"Are you kidding?" Her face lit up with a grin so broad it was probably visible from orbit. "I got his wallet."

She opened it upside down and poured credits into her free hand until they overflowed onto the pavement.

----

When we burst back into the apartment—Mission waltzing through the door with the droid to the tune of her own self-satisfied humming, and me and Zaalbar almost staggering after her under the weight of all the dessert boxes we'd bought—even Bastila had to smile.


	3. Bond

A/N: Here's part three, a quiet little story set a week into Revan's Jedi training (during the game timeline, natch). Thanks so much to everyone who's read and reviewed so far! I hope you enjoy.

I don't own KotOR or its characters.

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"Bond" (Bastila)

Dantooine, Jedi Enclave

----

I was used to her. That's the best way to put it. A week into my training and I was already used to her near-constant presence, to the way she moved when she sparred, to the length of her stride and the sound of her breathing at night. If she'd just disappeared one day, even then, I'm sure I would have felt her absence like a phantom limb. I respected her abilities. I wouldn't say I liked her.

We didn't have a lot to say to each other. She shied away from giving me Jedi-type advice with the Masters literally right around the corner, but it was clear that she also felt responsible on some level for guiding me. The upshot was that she gave me so many sermons on the perils of the dark side that I was tempted to switch my lightsaber crystal to red right then and there. I kept my mouth shut like a good apprentice, but Bastila must have felt my frustration. After a while, she stopped.

----

It was late. Or maybe it was early, but either way it was no time any sentient should ever be awake. I was in our room at the Jedi Enclave, trying to fall asleep and missing by a lightyear—too exhausted even to pass out. Also, if I slept, there was every possibility that Bastila would give me more weird dreams about Revan and Malak. Not my idea of a good night's rest.

I was still staring irritably at the insides of my eyelids when I heard Bastila's voice from the other bed. "Something's troubling you."

It was impossible to ignore her. The beds were wedged so close together in the narrow room that we could have reached out and touched hands without even stretching. She'd turned on her side to look at me, blue-gray eyes almost luminous even in the dark, and she was clearly expecting an answer. No, pretending to be asleep wouldn't get me out of this one.

"I'm fine," I said, wishing the Jedi Council would tell me how to turn this bond thing off when I didn't feel like being analyzed. There had to be a way.

"Why don't you try talking to me. Perhaps I can help."

Something was nudging at the edges of my mind, trying to work its way in. "You think I can't feel that?" I asked her.

The pressure stopped. "I'm sorry," she said. "I only thought to help unburden your mind."

"Asking would be a nice start, if you really want to help."

"Will you talk to me?"

"No," I said, rolling over into the pillow. Then I remembered that I was a grown-up and a Jedi apprentice and she was actually trying to have a real conversation for once in her life. "Yes. I'm worried about Mission."

"The one to explore the cave, or the one to stop Malak and the Sith?"

"The blue one."

"I'm sorry. I missed the lack of a definite article. Perhaps if you took your head out of your pillow."

"Feel free to start helping me unburden any time."

Bastila huffed out a small, frustrated sigh, then tried again in a slightly less infuriating tone. "You're still worried about how she's taking the destruction of Taris?"

I rolled back over and contemplated the ceiling. "I'm worried about her in general. She keeps insisting that she and Zaalbar are sticking with me for the foreseeable future, no matter what, and she's fourteen years old. I should be doing something."

"What, exactly?"

"I don't know. Telling her to eat her vegetables and watch out for boys, helping her figure out something to do with her life other than breaking and entering and disarming land mines. It's a lot of responsibility."

"If you think that's a lot of responsibility, I shudder to think of how you'll perceive the task that's about to be heaped upon your shoulders."

"Oh, come off it, would you? It's a different kind of responsibility."

Neither of us said anything for a minute. Eventually she caved. "It's good that you're treating it seriously, I suppose. Mission is a strong girl, but we all need the guidance and support of our elders in our lives." Her gaze shifted back to the ceiling; it was easier to talk when we weren't looking at each other. "She's holding up well. I've been checking on her periodically while you've been in training. Zaalbar and Carth are helping her to cope. I've tried to do what I can as well, when time permits."

"Like what?"

"I suggested to her that she might try easing the pain by meditating."

"And?"

"She called me 'Miss High-and-Mighty' and threw a Pazaak deck at me. I had to pick up all the cards."

Bastila still sounded miffed about it, too—and with good reason, since Mission's Pazaak deck was ridiculously large. I amused myself for a second with the image of Miss High-and-Mighty playing 189-card pickup. "Ah, the good old rebellious teenage phase. And the others?"

"You really shouldn't be thinking so much of them during your training. This is a time to seek refuge from the outside world."

"Indulge my curiosity, please? I've barely seen them."

"Yes, there's a reason for that." She sighed again but started talking anyway. "I've no idea why that Mandalorian is still here, unless he intends to try to steal the ship. He seems to spend a lot of time wandering the plains shooting things; I'm not sure I want to know what. As for Carth, he isn't pleased about what he insists on calling 'being left out of the loop' and carps at me almost continually about it. I've got a feeling his superiors have asked him to keep an eye on things." Here she shot me another quick glance; I didn't give her a thing. "He seems somewhat…invested in you. Perhaps this is as good a time as any to remind you that Jedi—"

"Don't give any return on investments, I know." Invested. What the hell did that mean? Invested in making sure I didn't stab him in the back? Invested in—

Bastila wasn't going to give me time to contemplate it. "There's no need to be defensive. I'm simply telling you to be wary, that's all."

"Can I ask you something?" I went right ahead and did it without waiting for a response; what normal people call "tactlessness," the Jedi call "helpful suggestions for improving one's character." "You and Carth are on the outs, you don't like Canderous, Mission attacks you on sight. Somehow I can't picture you and Zaalbar being best friends. Do you get along with anybody?"

"T3-M4 and I haven't exchanged a single cross word."

"T3 doesn't talk." The droid and I were on a first-name basis.

"Well, it always beeps very pleasantly."

If I'd just heard the words, I would've figured they were a joke, but she was just radiating defensiveness. Serious as sin, that was Bastila Shan.

"I'll give you one, then," I told her graciously. Compromise is important in relationship-building. "But I was talking more in general again."

"Whether I get along with anyone? Plenty of people; I—" Bastila cut herself off, probably just then picking up on how worked up she sounded. She was more reserved when she started again, like she was making a conscious effort to be judicious. Jedi seemed to do that a lot. I was still working on it. "It's true I haven't been accustomed to living and working so closely with non-Jedi. They're much more…difficult than members of the Order. All that emotion, I suppose."

"Jedi don't have it?"

"Jedi _control_ it. As you should know by now. I admit I didn't expect so much…"

"What?"

"Everything. All that squabbling over such trivial matters as who gets what quarters, the need to pry into each other's lives, the abrupt outbursts when one inadvertently says the wrong thing. I've barely experienced such things since I was a child."

I didn't think she quite grasped the importance of who got what quarters; I, for example, had been on a streak lately of sharing them with people who were willing to die for me five minutes after we met, and I wasn't sure I'd be sorry to see that trend continue. I also didn't think she was in the mood for that kind of friendly advice, so instead I objected, "I think all that's necessary. Clears the air. Look at Carth and Mission—they set the galactic record for dumbest fight ever, and once they got over it, they started getting along beautifully. Think of it as bonding." Actually, for my money the most inane argument in history was the one about who rescued whom from Brejik (glaringly obvious answer: I rescued her), but I was trying to be diplomatic here.

"Bonding?" she repeated. "It's one thing to be concerned for Mission's welfare, but I should stress again that your becoming a Jedi _changes_ the way you interact with others, as it must."

By the kriffing stars, I thought, another lecture. "Chan—"

"I'll do my best to explain." Bastila reached up like she was about to rake her fingers through her hair, but stopped halfway there and lay her hands down at her sides, fingertips splayed on the sheets. I'd noticed she had a conscious way of arranging her body when she was agitated, just like she had a conscious way of speaking—deliberately calm and neutral. Still, she looked strangely vulnerable lying like that, with her hair loose around her face and her simple sleeping robes.

"Jedi are set apart from others. We remain free of strong attachments—to family, to friends, to romantic partners. Outsiders, too, keep their distance because they rightly regard us as different. Thus it is only within the Order that we can truly form connections with others." She stressed her words carefully, apparently making sure I was getting all this. "And even then, there are distinctions. We must always observe the hierarchy and show respect to the Masters. And if one is somehow set apart in another way…."

A way like having Battle Meditation?

"When we first got here," I started, "Belaya was upset that a Padawan wouldn't be wearing the traditional robes of the Order…."

Bastila's full lips twisted. Her peach-colored clothing was folded at the foot of her bed. Elaborate collar, ornate details—not exactly the standard-issue Padawan robes. "Yes, well," she said with an edge of bitterness, "if one is somehow set apart…."

Lonely. I didn't think the word at the time, just felt it as it washed over me from her direction and faded again as she closed her eyes. Bastila Shan was lonely. Kept at a distance from outsiders, a Jedi with a gift—and all the scrutiny and jealousy of others that came with it, but no rank that might let her ease the pain of that distance with distinction. Stuck with a bondmate she barely knew and a crew she didn't know how to deal with. The Jedi Masters might prescribe against love, but they never said you couldn't make friends with your shipmates. She was icy with us because she didn't have a damn clue how else she could be.

And this was what I was signing up for?

I felt a sudden surge of—not pity, but compassion. A very Jedi-like emotion. Looking back, it was one of the first moments I felt confident that my feet had found the right path, ridiculous prescriptions aside. "Bastila," I said. "Can I try something?"

"What?"

"What am I feeling?"

"_What_?"

"Just say it." I took a long, slow breath and tried to fill my head with the most vivid memories I could come up with. I remembered bringing back those Cantina desserts with Mission and Zaalbar, joking around with Carth, soaring past the finish line of the Taris swoop track with the wind in my face and all around me, winning at Pazaak. I pictured the shimmering lights of Taris and the great trees in the center courtyard of the Enclave. I thought about the feeling I'd had earlier that day and forgotten since then—the exhaustion I'd felt after Bastila and I had sparred, the good kind.

"Happiness," Bastila named it quietly.

I imagined reaching it out to her, like holding out a hand. When I look back on that night, I can remember so clearly what I wanted to say, which would have been something like _you don't have to do this alone_. But I couldn't find the words then—just that feeling I suddenly wanted her to take.

"It isn't that simple, you know," she answered in a tone I couldn't read.

I was surprised by how soft my own voice sounded as I suggested, "Maybe it's a start."

She didn't answer. Both of us lay still for a long moment, until finally I felt, rather than saw, her smile. Just a little.

"Yes," she said. "Perhaps it is, at that." And I sensed her reaching back. The warmth enveloped us, flowing back and forth, forming a feedback loop between our minds.

Our sleep was dream-free that night.


	4. The Right Stuff

A/N: Part four features everyone's favorite Mandalorian merc, Canderous Ordo, and as such, I'm including a quick note on the Mandalorian language used in this chapter. You definitely won't need it to follow the story, so skip it if you like—it's just bonus info.

As Wookieepedia helpfully informs us, KotOR marked the first attempt at developing a Mandalorian language. The implication from the game is that Sasha is using some actual Mandalorian words, but that she's ascribing her own meanings to them. After KotOR, though, came the development by author Karen Traviss of a working Mandalorian language, Mando'a. I've tried to bring both those elements together, along with some facets of Mandalorian culture from post-KotOR canon (such as the commonness of adoptions).

I don't own any of that work, not to mention KotOR or its characters.

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"The Right Stuff" (Canderous)  
Dantooine, Ebon Hawk

----

Sometimes I wondered where the hell everyone went. Not that I expected them just to sit around on the ship when they weren't with me, but where did five sentients wander off to on a planet where there was nothing to do? And the droid? Did the droid have a hot date or something?

Canderous was the only one around the Ebon Hawk when I stopped in mid-afternoon to drop off a couple of spare weapons I'd picked up off the dead Mandalorians. At first I was worried that might lead to trouble, but all the blasters were generic models and he didn't seem all that interested in my presence anyway. I was on my way back out when I heard a noise and stopped.

And there it was again. Quiet, rapid taps, like the footsteps of a small animal. Was that what had gotten into the food supply? It was coming from the rear of the ship.

Heading that way, I came back across Canderous at the workbench, tinkering with a repeating blaster that took up half the table. Nothing he was doing sounded like tapping. "So that isn't you. Any idea what those noises are?" I asked.

He didn't even turn around. "Investigation isn't really my line of work, and those noises don't sound too dangerous. Just call me if you want something shot."

"Small things can be deadly," I said. "Jawas, for example. They might be short, but you just try playing one in Pazaak."

"Nice try."

So much for getting his help. I couldn't think of an easy way to convince him and in truth I didn't really need him anyway, so I got a good grip on my lightsaber and started creeping around the ship, looking for the source of the noise.

It didn't take long to find, not on a Dynamic-class freighter. We had a little blonde stowaway in the cargo hold. She was speaking a weird mix of Basic, a dialect of Mando'a and a whole lot of words that sounded completely made up, but it all obviously made perfect sense to her. Those impressive linguistic skills of mine didn't do me half as much good with it as gestures and a maddening amount of repetition.

Eventually I managed to establish that her name was Sasha; that she had been staying with Mandalorians, who she felt strongly were bad, bad people; and that her original home was Dantooine but now she liked me and lived on my ship. And she didn't plan on leaving, either.

Let's take a minute to review my partners on this mission. Defrosting Jedi ice princess and angst-ridden star pilot with permastubble? Nothing I could've done about them even if I'd wanted to; they were the ones running this show. Twi'lek street kid? Sure; at least she could handle her own with a blaster. Her Wookiee best friend? Hell, the more the merrier. Uncommunicative droid? At least he didn't take up any rations. Mandalorian ex-hit man? Well…needs must. But a little girl? No way. I was putting my foot down before anyone went bleeding-heart on me and suggested we all raise her collectively as our own.

I managed to convey to her, as gently as I could, that I was going out to look for her home and she should stay there. She didn't like that much but nodded. Halfway to the ramp, I realized I couldn't just leave her alone on the ship—I didn't want her running off, for one thing, and I also didn't want her messing with anything I was gone. Visions of the kid accidentally flying off with the Ebon Hawk danced unsettlingly in my head as I went back to find Canderous.

"Hey, Canderous," I said. "There's a little girl in the cargo hold who speaks some Mando'a. Is she yours?"

He just looked at me. "Did either of you suffer any major injuries while you were speaking with her?"

"Of course not."

"Then she's not mine. If she were my daughter, only one of you would still be standing."

"Oh, come on. She looks like she's all of eight years old, and I didn't threaten her."

"Maybe, but to a true Mandalorian that lightsaber just begs for a challenge."

And this was the guy I was leaving in charge of the kid. I straightened up and gave him an authoritative look. Not that he could see it now that he'd lost interest and gone back to the blaster rifle, but maybe he'd be able to hear the commanding tone in my voice. "I've got a job for you."

He brightened slightly. "What is it?"

"The girl."

Canderous actually turned all the way around and evaluated me seriously with an air that might almost have been respect. "I don't have a problem with it, but I never figured you for the type to put contracts out on eight-year-olds."

I couldn't tell if he was yanking my chain or not. "No, I need you to watch her." I'd better clarify that. "Alive. Unharmed. I need you to keep an eye on her while I find her parents. And don't scare her, either. She's been through a lot."

"You want me to babysit?" he asked, sounding incredulous and maybe insulted. Obviously this was not the kind of thing Mandalorian war heroes did. If a task didn't involve freefalling toward the planet he was about to destroy with only fifteen centimeters of glowing metal between him and an excruciating death, apparently it wasn't worth his attention.

I tried persuasion. "No, no, I need you to—uh, neutralize any threats she might encounter. You're her muscle."

"So what I'm hearing is, you want me to babysit."

Busted. "Please?"

"Forget it. I have more important things to do."

"Name one."

"Staring at the doorway." He shot me a smirk that just dripped with sarcasm. "That way, if any threats do turn up, I'll be the first to know."

I could try to take her off the ship with me. Between the kath hounds and the Mandalorians, it was too dangerous to haul her around the planet by the hand, but if I waited around the Jedi Enclave long enough, I might get lucky and run across Bastila or someone else slightly responsible who could watch her. But I had things to do on Dantooine—kath hound populations to thin out and overappreciated droids to save—and I couldn't afford to waste time cooling my heels. There was no alternative. Canderous was just going to have to suck it up and look after her. And if he wouldn't do it on his own, I was going to have to make him.

"Canderous," I said, and then in Mando'a, _"Ne shab'rud'ni._" _Don't mess with me._

He shot me a sharp, almost startled stare, and I could see the interplay of thoughts on his face. That warning is a dangerous one, a lot more likely to start a fight than preempt one. What I was doing was asserting my authority over him—pulling rank, with "rank" here defined as "ability to beat the snot out of him." If I'd insulted his honor by doing it, there was a good chance that five minutes from now, at least one of us wouldn't have to worry about who watched the girl, or about much of anything else. So far we'd just had a vague partnership, bound by the shared goal of getting off Taris. Did he respect me enough as a warrior to follow my orders? Was the greater honor to be had in striking me down or in joining my fight against the Sith? Those questions were integral to Canderous's identity, and I kept my hand close to my lightsaber, aware that my life might hang in the balance.

How the hell did I know all that, I wondered dimly. I couldn't remember ever even talking with a Mandalorian before I met Canderous. Well, must've just picked it up somewhere. I pushed on.

"You want to come with me, fight the Sith, find honor in battle?" I asked. "Well, honor isn't free. If you're going to stay on this ship, you can't just do the parts of the job you like. And right now I'm asking for your help."

He was still staring me down, eyes narrowed. I started to think about which of his limbs I should try to sever first it if came to a fight. Finally he said, "Fine. Bring her in here. Just remember there's a limit to the number of petty favors I'm willing to do."

I managed to hold off the enormous sigh of relief until I was out of earshot. Sasha was suspicious of where I was taking her, but she was wiling enough to follow me once I gave her my hand. Hers was sticky. What the hell had she been eating from that supply bin?

"Uhh…_na abds yooba. Gon-disen_," I said, pointing to Canderous. _He won't hurt you. I like him_, or something like that, hopefully. I pointed to Sasha. "_Yooba na palkie bristag_." _Don't leave the ship_. She looked worried. I was running low on vocabulary, so I launched into a complex series of gestures intended to show that I was coming back and that Uncle Candy would watch her until I returned. Uncle Candy managed a smile that looked more like a toothy grimace and emphasized all his scars. I left with profound misgivings. What in the galaxy was I doing?

----

As luck would have it, I didn't have to run around asking everyone in a ten-kilometer radius if they knew anything about a human girl who'd been kidnapped by Mandalorians. I was still working my way around the courtyards when I found someone who'd heard someone say there was a Twi'lek somewhere who was looking for some girl on behalf of someone else. Armed with this helpful information, I got recognition out of one of the Jedi (a _fellow_ Jedi, I had to remind myself), who le d me to said Twi'lek's room in the enclave. Descriptions were exchanged, assurances of the girl's current and future safety were given on either side, and I agreed to bring Lur Arka Sulas back to the Ebon Hawk to collect Sasha. The whole thing had taken less than an hour.

"This is it," I told the Twi'lek as we headed up the ramp and into the ship. "Canderous! I found—"

All I heard was blaster fire.

Oh, no.

"Wait here!" I barked at Sulas. Then I readied my lightsaber and dashed forward into the main hold, ready to do battle with the forces of darkness. But I didn't see any. What I saw was Canderous, arms folded as he watched the little girl put blaster holes in an interior wall. The rifle must have weighed half as much as she did.

"Nice work," Canderous was saying thoughtfully in Mando'a. "But your aim is too low. A shot to the extremities might work if you're just trying to scare your target a little first, but you wait too long before going for the kill and he can easily turn the tables on you. A good warrior acts swiftly."

"Canderous, what are you doing?" I demanded.

"Teaching the girl how to shoot a repeating blaster rifle," he replied coolly, as though that ridiculously self-evident answer actually had something to do with what I was really asking, which was _why the kriff are you doing it?_ "She has potential. Her aim's already improving." He gestured to a fist-size pit in the wall, which had definitely not been there an hour earlier.

"Say goodbye to the nice man, Sasha," I said through my teeth. "_Laesfa_." _Home._

Now she _really_ didn't want to leave, but she stopped clinging to Canderous' leg when she saw Sulas; maybe she recognized him, or maybe he just looked different enough from the Mandalorians for her to trust him. After that it only took a few minutes to get her to agree to go. Reluctantly, she hefted the blaster and offered it back to her teacher.

"No," Canderous said with unusual solemnity. "Keep it."

----

"Pretty generous, giving the kid your blaster rifle," I commented when they were gone.

He shrugged. "I've got others. It's a shame the Mandalorians here seem to have treated her so badly. In my clan we would have adopted her as one of our own and taught her the ways of the warrior." He eyed me. "Our saying is 'train your sons to be strong, but your daughters to be stronger.'"

"Well, if she wasn't before, she is now." Who'd've thought. I got the sense I was included in that statement about strong daughters, which seemed like a sign of respect from him. For now, at least, the power struggles were done. And with Sasha safely off the ship and therefore our mission completed, the dents in the wall started to look almost decorative. Feeling like extending some goodwill, I stretched and said, "I was on my way somewhere before all this started, actually. I'm off to shoot kath hounds and find droids. You want to come?"

"Not really. You handle the grunt work for a while. I'm going to do some work on another repeating blaster."

"Suit yourself." I checked my lightsaber and my pack and started to make my way out. At the door I stopped and said over my shoulder, "Hey, Canderous? _Mandokarla_." _You've got the right stuff_.

"Whatever you say, Jedi," he said gruffly. "Just don't tell anyone."


	5. Acceptable

A/N: You KotOR vets probably know that the game had a lot of cut content, notably dozens of lines from Juhani—everything from detailed planetary descriptions to a conversation about her distrust of Canderous. It's good stuff, so I wanted to incorporate just a little of it into a story. One minor contradiction: Juhani says at one point that she could not talk to Canderous, but if you have them both in the party there are four (again, cut) instances in which she can snap at him. I thought it would be fun to give Juhani a chance for some righteous snark, so I've gone more with the latter conception of their interactions.

And since I know there are some fellow Carth fans in the house, here's a heads-up that the next story is all him. I haven't forgotten about you, promise.

As always, I don't own KotOR or its characters.

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"Acceptable" (Juhani, Canderous)

Tatooine

----

"I am not certain this is an honorable means of attaining funds," Juhani said. "Bastila would say—"

"Yeah, well, I don't see Princess Jedi doing a lot to put credits on the table," Canderous snapped. His knuckled cracked loudly. "If you want to eat, you have to find work. Doesn't matter what."

She had a point; hunting with two lethal beams of pure energy probably isn't exactly sporting. Then again, the ex-merc's point was well taken too: we'd hocked everything we could spare, nobody on the planet would give me another swoop race, and we still needed credits to buy the translation droid—not to mention keep the ship running. Mission had offered to get into illegal high-stakes Pazaak, but as her de facto guardian I figured that was probably just the kind of thing I was supposed to be preventing. So there we were, out in the Tatooine desert hunting wraids with lightsabers. And a gun the size of my torso.

"Grubbing for credits without regard for what is right? I suppose that is only to be expected, Mandalorian."

"There is no emotion," I muttered just under my breath. Juhani clamped her mouth shut, eyes blazing. Canderous barked out a laugh.

Ten standard minutes out of Anchorhead and I was already regretting bringing them out there together. I couldn't blame Juhani for having a problem with Canderous—if his people had annihilated mine, I wouldn't have been inclined to buy him a drink either—but when they'd both volunteered to come on the hunt I'd been hoping they could tolerate each other's presence for at least a few hours. As far as I knew, this was the first time they'd exchanged any words more substantial than "pass the salt."

We trudged on for a while in silence, making slow progress through the sand. Not a wraid in sight. The water in our canteens was hot within minutes. My robes made for pretty good protection against the suns but only made the heat worse, especially as grains of sand got trapped in the folds. With every step I hated this damn planet just a little bit more. "Why the hell would anyone put a Star Map here?" I asked conversationally when the tense silence threatened to bore me to tears. "I wouldn't even stop here to ask directions if I didn't have to, let alone hide a map to my superweapon."

"Perhaps these Builders felt it would be well hidden here," Juhani suggested. "That no one would bother to search for it in such a place. It would be clever thinking, really. Tatooine is a filthy desert. Planets such as this should not be fit for life at all. My skin itches just to be here."

"Is sand getting in your fur, Cathar?" Canderous shot back.

"No more than is getting in your head."

"If you think I'm going to tolerate—"

"Sorry to interrupt the love fest, but I think there's some people who'd like to join in," I cut him off, jerking my thumb at the figures running over the dunes toward us.

Juhani's eyes narrowed as she peered in their direction. "A raiding party of the Sand People. Four of them."

"Who gets the spare?" Canderous immediately wanted to know.

"Maybe we can resolve our differences nonviolently," I said dryly, without a lot of hope. Canderous's expression implied that I was in the running for the title of biggest idiot he'd ever met.

The Sand People stopped about twenty meters away from us, masks and goggles staring out impassively. Not a very cute look; no wonder the settlers' first instinct was to start shooting.

"We're not looking for any tr—" was as far as I got before a blaster bolt from the leader's rifle narrowly missed taking my arm off, because of course the Sand People didn't speak Basic and I didn't know a word of Homicidal, Badly-Dressed Desert Dweller. Since they obviously didn't plan on stopping their attempts to murder us anytime soon, I had no choice but to throw a lightsaber at the nearest one's head.

The beam slashed across his mask and zipped right back to my hand, and after that it was a free-for-all. The Sand Person I'd hit hefted his stick and charged toward me with a flurry of blows. "I will take their leader!" Juhani shouted. She sprang forward to meet the one with the rifle, almost faster than the eye could track. In the next second she was a glowing blur of graceful, deadly slashes and strikes. Behind me, Canderous was pumping bolts into another one. _Disguises_, I thought. I put my target in Stasis to give myself time to plan my strikes carefully, and then I cut him down in the way that would do the least damage to his robes.

Saving the galaxy is never as pretty as it sounds. Canderous must have caught on, because his aim edged upward for headshots. His opponent—who was, like most of them, armed only with a gaffi stick; let nobody ever say they weren't a courageous people in the face of death—pitched face-first to the ground at the same moment as Juhani's. She let out an adrenaline-fueled cry of triumph and—

"Get down!"

Canderous slammed into her with his full weight and toppled them both headfirst into a hollow of sand, just half a second before a grenade skimmed over the ground behind them right to where Juhani'd just been standing and detonated. The frag explosion rocked the area so hard I lost my footing and toppled over on one knee, instinctively scrambling to cover my head with my arms. Before the smoke cleared I was up and sprinting again, just in time to outrun the second grenade blast. I made it to the Sand Person before he could throw a third one and slashed once, twice, three times with my lightsabers. He collapsed onto the sand. The third grenade rolled away from him with the pin still in it and lay still.

Canderous was just sitting up when I turned around again. I could see where the blasts had scored the back of his armor badly with shrapnel, and he was putting a hand up to feel where a shard must have glanced across the back of his head. Juhani pushed herself onto her hands and knees a few seconds later, spitting sand and groping for her lightsabers. She and Canderous had been lucky not to land on them.

"You two okay?" I called, jogging back toward them.

"Of course we're okay. Two frag grenades are no match for heavy armor." Canderous was giving me the "you're an idiot" look again. Nonetheless, the hand on his head came back bloodied, and he jabbed a medpack in through a joint in his armor without waiting for his healing implant to kick in.

"You saved me," Juhani said to him around the last few grains of sand, sounding half wondering, half accusatory. She was feeling around her ribs and back, which I estimated were probably bruised but still in the right number of pieces.

"Just pay attention to your surroundings and don't make me do it again. A warrior like you should be above such amateurish mistakes."

Her eyes narrowed to slits. "A Cathar warrior?"

"_Any_ warrior who can fight as skillfully as you do when you're not being stupid. You think I'd put myself at risk for someone who wasn't worthy to battle?" He scowled. "Are we ready to keep moving now? Those wraid skull plates aren't going to remove themselves."

Juhani spat again and knelt to take the clothing from the nearest corpse. We got twelve wraids in the hunt that day, but she didn't say another word.

----

The next morning, Canderous' armor was propped up just across from his bunk. It had been cleaned and repaired—clumsily, as if by someone who'd never worn a suit of body in their life, but the work would hold. It would have taken a very stealthy person to sneak it out of the men's quarters without waking either Canderous or Carth, two longtime fighters who had the light sleeping habits to show for it. A stunned Canderous asked everyone on the ship about it, but no one would admit to having done it. Coincidentally, Juhani's golden eyes were rimmed with dark shadows, like she hadn't slept all night.

I'd be lying if I called it the start of a lifelong friendship, but in retrospect I think that incident did mark the beginning of the tacit, respectful truce that arose between them over the course of our travels. When I talked to Juhani alone later that day, though, her anger was still simmering even though her debt of honor had been repaid. "I have never trusted Mandalorians," she told me fiercely. "They drove my parents from Cathar, aided the Sith and attacked the Republic. Their warped notions of 'honor' may provoke them to do even more heinous acts."

"You should not judge Canderous by other Mandalorians," I said, that being the most Jedi-like line I could come up with at the time.

"His kind may prove to be a danger to the galaxy again, but this man himself has proven acceptable," she replied. "So far."


	6. Trust II

A/N: Sometimes the simplest titles are the most effective. (Or maybe I just suck at coming up with them, your call. But I wanted to connect this to the first chapter to emphasize what's changed since then.)

I'm a sucker for Fem Revan/Carth, and luckily, there are a lot of great stories about them out there. Since that's the case, my goal with this one was to write something a little different, a scene I'd never seen done before. I hope that I've succeeded and that you enjoy! Thanks so much to everyone out there who's reading, reviewing, and putting this story on alert—you're all the best.

I don't own KotOR or its characters.

----

"Trust II" (Carth)  
Tatooine, just outside Anchorhead

----

I timed my attack carefully. Aside from a stray gizka, Carth was by himself in the cockpit, which was important. I didn't feel like deflecting the ribbing—or the lectures—I'd inevitably get if any of the others heard what I was about to ask.

"Could I ask you for a favor?"

Carth was doing something piloty to the systems but stopped when I came in and turned sideways in his chair to face me. "Sure, ask away."

"If you're not busy, would you mind coming out into the desert with me for a while?"

One of his eyebrows shot up. "Did you get a sudden urge to go on one last sightseeing tour, or is that your idea of a date?"

"No, I bet the sand'd chafe like hell. As it happens, I could use some help with my Jedi training."

"I don't mind helping, but wouldn't you be better off with Bastila or Juhani?"

"Not this time. I'd say you're the best—nay, the only person in the galaxy qualified to do this for me."

Was I imagining things, or did his laugh have a flustered edge to it? "Well, how can I refuse an invitation like that? Just give me a minute to fill a couple of canteens."

"Bring blasters," I called after him as he left the cockpit. "Big ones. Maybe a spare."

He whipped back into the doorway. "What the hell kind of date is this, sister?"

----

To say that Anchorhead had a nightlife would be optimistic in the extreme, but most of the lights in the public buildings were on and Czerka was obviously still up and running—better at night than double noon, I guessed. Like Dantooine, Tatooine gives you the feeling that nothing ever moves. I had a hunch that if I pushed open the cantina door I'd see Helena Shan still there, poised frostily in the corner waiting for her daughter to come back, not having moved since the last time we'd been in. I had no doubt at all that Griff Vao was right where we'd left him.

I only led us a few minutes into the desert, still in sight of Anchorhead, pointedly _away_ from the Czerka sandcrawler and the unwanted company it might attract. Between the settlement and the stars, the light wasn't bad, although the cold might get to you if you stood still long enough. Good thing standing still wasn't part of my plan for the evening.

So far Carth had played along—blasters and all—without asking anything, but it wouldn't have taken a Jedi to tell that he was more than a little wary of the whole setup. My stopping on a random dune in the middle of nowhere probably didn't go very far toward reassuring him. "What are we doing, exactly?" he asked.

"I want you to shoot at me."

"What?" He stared at me, putting up his hands palm-out the way you do when you're trying to calm someone who's utterly lost it and might decide with no warning to put a lightsaber through your eye socket. (I was to become very familiar with that feeling myself not too long afterwards.) "I—I mean, I know you've got a lot on your shoulders, but it—it can't be that bad, can it?"

"Don't worry. You won't hurt me." I spun my lightsabers by way of demonstrating what a professional I was. He didn't look terribly impressed. "What I'm practicing is deflecting blaster fire."

"Okay, be serious."

"I am, you Gamorrean pig-man." Becoming a Jedi hadn't done a lot to increase the sophistication of my go-to insults. "You've seen Bastila do it."

"Sure, a few times, but she's had years of training. You've been a Jedi for what, a couple of weeks?"

"I should've mentioned that to Calo Nord. Maybe he would've taken it into consideration when he was shooting at me." Carth shot me such a swift look of understanding that I wished I hadn't said it; Mission must've told him how that damn bounty hunter had almost fried me earlier that day before Bastila had finally taken him down. I reached the sabers over my head and stretched to loosen up my limbs and break the sudden stillness. "We can start off slow, if it'll make you feel better. Just begin with one blaster and work your way up."

"You're—you're crazy, you know that?" He sounded less resistant than he had a minute earlier.

"Part of my charm?" I suggested with my best wry smile.

Carth hesitated, studying me like he was looking for something about me that would convince him this was actually a good idea. I don't know whether he found anything, but after a long moment he gave a resigned sigh and said, "Well, back up, then." I flashed a quick smile of gratitude and backed away from him—fifteen, twenty, what I estimated as twenty-three meters, the limit of his range. And Carth aimed a blaster at my head.

----

A few seconds of silence passed in which I felt hypersensitive to everything around me—the weight of the lightsabers in my hands, sand shifting under my boots, Carth's finger on the trigger as I waited for it to tighten. Then I heard the sound of the first shot and red light was racing toward me over the sand. I spun one saber and connected, slamming the bolts back out into the darkness. Carth began to shoot slowly, at regular intervals, giving me time to warm up, a nice slow start. Not the kind of sportsmanship Calo Nord and the Sith were big on.

"Faster," I urged him. "Switch it up a little."

"You sure you can handle it?"

"You worry about shooting, flyboy, I'll worry about not getting shot."

"All right, all right!" His laugh really carried in the still night air. The shots started coming unpredictably—one second between blasts, two seconds, half a second. I didn't have time to bring my sabers back to the ready position anymore, just kept swinging. I could feel the impact as each shot connected with the energy beams and arced back out. Even though the firing was arrhythmic, I started to build up a rhythm of my own—spin, thrust, thrust, block, whirl.

I didn't have to ask him to add the second blaster; he must have sensed when I was ready. He squeezed the shots off in pairs or at random intervals, steady at my chest and head—a soldier's solid aim, every time. I swung harder, working my way across the sand toward him the way I'd get in range of an attacker. Meter by meter, the distance between us started to close.

"Not bad," Carth commented.

"You didn't think the Jedi—uff!—went to all the trouble of training me just so I could—hah!—levitate datapads, did you?" The ability to bat plasma bolts around probably wasn't at the top of their list of things I was intended to gain from Jedi training, but let's face it: no one ever became a Jedi without thinking, at least a little, of the awesome factor.

"Hey, you tell _me_ why they trained you."

I was just opening my mouth to ask if we could not get into this again when pain seared my face. I'd been slow and a stray shot had hit me in the cheek. Stupid! Bastila would say that was what I got for letting myself get distracted, and she'd be right. Carth half-lowered his blasters. "Fine, I'm fine," I told him. "Keep going."

The shots slowed down—he was rattled now—but picked up speed when I connected with every one of them, consistently and hard. Gradually, his perfect aim started to slip wild, forcing me to break my stance to protect more than just the center of my body.

"Getting tired?" I called.

"You worry about not getting shot, gorgeous, I'll worry about shooting."

I judged I must be close to halfway to him by then. It wasn't easy to see him with the light and color from our weapons streaking all over my field of vision, but I could make him out better at this distance.

He looked so steady standing there—feet planted, aim deliberate, a fixed point. It was rare for me to see him in action; he was usually several meters behind me while I fought up close and personal with a lightsaber or, before that, a vibroblade. Now that I had a chance to watch him, I realized just how in his element he was with those blasters. His bearing was all confidence, with the understated ease that came from long experience. Those two stray locks of hair were still hanging down over his right eye.

It was almost embarrassing how alluring I found it all, even while he was _shooting at me_.

"You know, you—"

"What?"

_Jedi!_ I imagined Bastila hissing in my ear. "—could stand to get a jacket that—ngh—doesn't cause physical pain to everyone who looks at it."

He fired off a burst of shots so rapidly I nearly dislocated both my shoulders scrambling to bat them all back. "What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing, if you don't need your retinas."

"I _like_ this jacket, all right?" he said, so defensively that I could only assume I'd fracked up hard somehow. It'd probably been a present from his wife, aimed at making sure no other woman would never come near him. Or maybe his son had been colorblind. Damn it.

Maybe because my foot was firmly lodged in my mouth, I took a false step and didn't get my right saber down fast enough, didn't even swing close to the blasts. Two shots ripped into my side. Direct hits, both of them. I reeled and tried to recover. In the process I mis-stepped again, badly, and staggered.

"Okay, that's enough!" Carth burst out, starting to holster the blasters this time. Any residual irritation about the jacket was gone. "I know it's good practice, but I'm not going to get you killed out here."

"Don't stop." The cold air and the exertion had scraped my voice raw, but at least I'd stopped seeing stars. I found my footing again, then unclenched three fingers from my right-hand lightsaber and raked my hair back from my eyes. "I have to be able to do this, Carth. I'll tell you when I've had enough. Promise."

He hesitated. I had adrenal stims in my pouch; it would only take a few seconds to jab one in. But I knew I couldn't count on the drugs to keep me running all the time. What I had consistently was the Force and my own willpower, and those were what I was going to have to draw on now. We'd push through, I told myself.

"Come on, flyboy. I can take it! Hit me with everything you've got!" I half-shouted.

And Carth did.

A storm of blaster bolts lit up the air between us. The wounds on my side were roaring with pain. I wanted to and clutch at them and whimper like an animal, but I kept swinging. I tried to lose consciousness of my injuries and the soreness in my arm muscles and even Carth, the blaster flashes lighting up his concerned face with a red glow every time he fired. There's a sweet spot in battle that I never found before I became a Jedi—being aware of everything around you without thinking deliberately about any of it, just going by instinct. I could feel myself getting closer with every hit.

Things came into focus, until the only thing I was tracking on was the red lights racing toward me.

I took a bad shot to the leg but didn't even slow down. The pain seemed abstract. He made me fight for every step, but that's not what I remember; what stands out in my mind now is how calm I felt, how assured that my body and the Force could work for me and I knew just how to make them. And swing by swing, meter by meter, I made my way closer until I was right in front of him. Close enough to touch.

We both let our arms drop at the same time. My lightsaber beams retracted; with the loss of that light and the blaster bolts, everything went almost black until the residual lights behind my eyelids faded and my eyes readjusted to the night. The first sight that resolved itself was Carth's face.

"That enough for you?" he asked.

"Yeah." I had to take a couple of steps to stop myself from flopping down on the sand. He dropped one of the blasters and snapped a hand to my arm to keep me steady.

"Those were some moves."

"That was some shooting." My laugh sounded almost giddy. I tried to recover with a dignified Jedi-like throat-clearing. "See, that wasn't so bad, was it?"

"The hell it wasn't! Do you have any idea how sore my arms are?"

The concern in his expression belied the tone of the joke. Normally a line like that would be my cue to come back with something roguishly charming, but I'd just been shot a bunch of times and wasn't exactly at the height of my capacity for wit. I took a slow, deep breath and tried to concentrate on healing myself; it took several attempts before the pain began to smooth out. As soon as it did, I noticed that my robes were badly torn and probably holding more grains of sand than the surrounding dunes. I'd been right about it chafing like hell. Carth looked slightly less worse than I imagined I did for the wear—maybe there was something to be said for the jacket after all if it kept the damn sand out.

"All right?" he asked. I nodded. He let go of my arm and bent down to pick up his blaster and the two canteens, one of which he offered me. I drank until I thought I might drown. "Well, then we'd better get back to the ship. Bastila'll have a fit if she sees how torn up your robes are."

"Let alone finds out you were the one doing the tearing."

"Could we, uh, just keep that between us? I like all my limbs where they are, thanks."

"Our secret." I rubbed sand from my neck and added, "Thanks, by the way. I appreciate the help."

He laughed. "It's not often someone actually thanks me for shooting them."

"First time for everything, I guess."

We turned and started the long, dusty walk back to the Ebon Hawk. Neither of us said much on the way. Just outside the Anchorhead gate, he said with studied casualness, "You know, I—I was wondering something. Ah…why'd you pick me to come with you instead of Canderous or the new droid? All you needed was someone with a blaster, right?"

"I trust you." I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye to see how he took that; it was tough to tell from his profile. Those damn stray locks of hair.

"Oh, yeah? That's—that's good to hear."

He didn't reciprocate. In fact, he didn't say anything; he stayed lost in his thoughts for a while as the gate opened for us and we worked our way back through the settlement. I found myself mentally reciting the Jedi Code in time with each step: there-_is -_no-e-_mo_-tion…. My lousy judgment didn't get the better of me until just after we passed the hunting lodge, where I finally broke down and said, "I also chose you because I knew you would trust me."

He actually stopped walking and stared at me. "What?"

"To drag you out into the desert in the middle of the night with a shoddy explanation, for one thing." I kept going, knowing that this conversation was going to get awkward even faster if I stood still and treated it seriously. "But more than that—to know my limits. I knew you'd be able to keep shooting, because you'd know I'd be strong enough not to let you hurt me. You know how much trust that takes?"

"You—you dragged me all the way out there just to make a roundabout point like that?" Carth's expression suggested that he didn't consider _that _terribly impressive either. "You really are becoming a Jedi."

"Actually, I just came up with it now."

"Well, it sure sounded premeditated."

"That kind of thinking is the opposite of meditation, trust me. But I can't say I'd be disappointed if everything that came out of my mouth sounded like it was the brilliant product of long planning."

"That seems to be the effect you people are always going for." He kicked the ground with the toe of one boot in frustration. "Damn. We just keep coming back to this Jedi thing, don't we?"

"It's hard not to." Even now people were looking at us, taking in my beat-up robes and the lightsabers hanging off my belt. This rock probably didn't see a lot of Jedi (and who could blame them?). Bastila's lectures had all been right. Joining the order changed everything.

"Shall we?" I asked with a nod to the Ebon Hawk. Later we'd have more to say about all this, I was sure, but right then I needed to get away, to clean up and rest.

Carth's tone was easy, his face unreadable. "After you."

I sketched a fair imitation of Bastila's sweeping bow and started up the ramp, intensely aware of his presence close behind me. No, I decided. I needed to meditate before I did anything else.

----

It's strange how fondly I remember that night. Carth's putting a blaster to my head—looking back, I'm glad we didn't know.


	7. Plague

A/N: Part seven here! Sort of like the first story, this one takes a quest from the game and plays out how our heroes would solve it. I did take one liberty: gizka don't canonically reproduce exponentially (IIRC, the number doubles every planet you land on up to 96 gizka), but I'm all about raising the stakes.

As ever, I don't own KotOR or its characters.

* * *

"Plague" (Ensemble)  
Ebon Hawk, en route Tatooine—Kashyyyk

* * *

The little monsters were everywhere. _Everywhere_. From the cockpit to the cargo hold, clambering all over the controls and the swoop bike and the crew like they owned the place, filling the ship with the echoes of every one of the hops every one of them took every day, staring at your food while you were eating, staring at _you_ in the 'fresher, plopping on your chest while you slept so the first thing you woke up to were those kriffing eye sockets _right in your face_.

I may or may not have screamed like a baby the first time that happened.

At first we tried to ignore them. We only started out with six or so, so as long as you didn't step on one of them, they were pretty easy to forget about. It wasn't until later that it hit us: gizka reproduce. Fast. And often.

It seemed criminal that even the damn reptiles were getting more action than I was.

The hell of it was that everyone was always up for complaining about the gizka, but no one seemed interested in actually _doing_ anything. "I wish I could help you with that," said Bastila, in perfect accord with Juhani's "I do not know how to help you with that. I am sorry." Zaalbar told me, "I know nothing of what you speak" and went back to untangling gizka from his leg hair. We were on a quest to rid the galaxy of the Sith and we couldn't even rid our ship of a bunch of pests barely bigger than blaster pistols. I was starting to get concerned about our chances of success here.

My last nerve finally snapped the day after we left Tatooine. I'd had to dump gizka out of my boots when I got dressed that morning, so I was feeling less than charitable toward them from the outset. Juhani and I must've spent fifteen standard minutes trying to get enough of them out of the women's quarters to let us meditate without being hopped on.

"Never mind," Juhani soothed me, sounding more like she was trying to convince herself. "There is no emotion, and if there is no emotion, the irritation of these gizka will be as nothing to us. Let us meditate." She sat down on the nearest bed, which happened to be Bastila's. Instantly she started violently and let out a curse I'd never even heard before, then made a visible effort to calm herself down.

"What is it?" I asked.

Her teeth were clenched so hard she could barely get the words out. "I am reminding myself of the Jedi Code."

"Any particular reason?"

"I have just sat on a gizka." She paused. "It is…not a pleasant feeling. There are bones and…fluids. I am resisting the urge to enter into a frenzy of violence and destroy every one of the creatures."

"Keep resisting!" I said, thinking about the splatters that would leave and knowing who'd get stuck wiping them up. "There is no emotion! I'm gonna go find a towel."

A family of gizka had nested in the towels.

I had to recite the Jedi Code all the way through three times before I felt prepared to do anything other than scream incoherently with rage. "Does _anybody_ know what to do about these damn gizka?" I shouted to the crew of the Ebon Hawk at large, making a heroic effort at containing my anger.

"You can figure it out on your own, can't you?" shouted back the pilot, who I _used_ to like.

"All right, that does it. Everyone come here." I tried to stalk dangerously to the center of the ship, but it turned out that the only way to avoid getting crunchy gizka pulp all over my boots was to tiptoe. I tiptoed dangerously. "We need to talk. All of us. _Now_."

The main hold was crawling (hopping?) with big reptilian bodies. T3 was basically immobilized, since there was nowhere to move without gunking up its wheels running over gizka. The others, as they filtered in, weren't much better off; Bastila's robes were snagged where they'd been on her and Canderous entered shaking one off his leg and into the wall. Zaalbar had to keep untangling their feet from his fur. Mission came in with one on top of her head, although in her case it looked intentional.

"Look," I said once everyone was there, "we have a problem, and if we keep ignoring it, these gizka are going to overrun the ship. Luckily, you're all smart, resourceful people, and I know we can figure out a solution to this if we just put our heads together. In fact—" I punched the door controls, shutting us in. One of the gizka didn't move in time, and half of it joined us while the other half stayed outside. I glanced at the pulp and continued, "—we're not leaving this room until we do."

"You're going to hold us prisoner?" There went that Kinrath pup face from Bastila again. "Evidently I missed the day of your Jedi training on which you were told that was an acceptable means of getting your way."

She was right; it wasn't Jedi-like at all. In fact, I was feeling authoritative in a way that was probably right on the direct line to the dark side, like everything else Bastila disapproved of. But—desperate times. "I'll be a lot more Jedi-like when I can meditate without getting assaulted by a colony of gizka," I said, though in retrospect that might have been a big fat lie. "Ideas?"

"Are they edible?" Canderous asked.

"Do you wish to be the first to attempt it?" Juhani replied coolly. I noticed she had changed her robes.

"You get hungry enough…" His lip curled and he left the thought hanging. Juhani seethed with barely-concealed rage; Bastila gave her the famous Bastila Shan You're-About-to-Screw-Up Warning Glance. No matter who owed whom whose life, if we weren't careful, one of these days one of them would kill the other and the rest of us would all be missing the days when the worst domestic problem we had was gizka.

Carth cut in to settle the argument. "Even the stuff that comes out of the synthesizer's more appetizing than those things. There must be something else we can do with them."

A gizka was trying to hop up into the blaster hole Sasha had made in the wall. It was distracting.

"Supplication: May I use them for target practice, master? They are disappointingly small, but perhaps I can look upon that as an opportunity to refine my sniper shot," HK-47 suggested optimistically.

"I've tried that," Canderous said. "They spawn as fast as you can shoot them."

T3 emitted a series of beeps. "T3 says there's a direct correspondence between gizka death and reproduction," I translated. "In other words, every time we kill one, a new one appears." For the life of me I couldn't figure out how that one worked, but T3 usually turned out to be right about information like that.

"Does it work the other way around too?" Mission asked. "So every time a gizka's born, another one dies?"

T3 beeped again. "Nope. If left unchecked, the population will increase—" dire-sounding beeps, "—exponentially."

"Wasn't there a vendor selling gizka poison in Anchorhead?" Zaalbar asked.

I translated both that and T3's response for the others: "That should work. Once one is infected, it attacks all the others until the whole population's gone."

We all digested that for a second. Bastila was the first to weigh in: "The wanton slaughter of these harmless creatures is an action that could easily lead to the dark side."

"Perhaps this is not the opportune moment to confess this to you," Juhani said to her, "but regrettably I smashed one of them into your bedsheets earlier today. The stains are proving…challenging to remove."

"I've changed my mind. Kill them all."

"On your—" Canderous started.

"_No_."

Two gizka were mating right by one of Carth's feet. I was working so hard on not making any connections there that I almost jumped out of my robes when Carth actually spoke. "Have you thought this through?" he asked. "Gizka attacking and killing each other all over the ship? We'll just have a pile of corpses everywhere in place of live creatures. And if there's any chance that poison could contaminate our food supply, we could be in real trouble."

"Corpses are a lot easier to get rid of than living creatures." Canderous' grin was wolfish. "You can trust my extensive experience in that field." He was in a foul mood today; the gizka must be getting even to him. Carth glared vibrodaggers. I shot them both my Bastila impression and they cooled off, but not much.

"Statement: The Mandalorian is correct, master. Efficient body disposal is among my many useful functions. Though I do not enjoy it as much as assassination, I would nonetheless be happy to pitch in."

"No way. I don't just wanna kill the little guys, you know? Isn't there somewhere we can take them?" Mission pleaded.

"Where do you suggest, Mission?" Bastila asked.

"I—I dunno. Didn't we hear that rumor that someone on Manaan was looking for animals for a zoo? Maybe we could take them there."

"A zoo?" Canderous repeated incredulously, shoving two gizka roughly off the edge of his seat. They landed a meter and a half away and immediately started trying to get Zaalbar to pet them. "Is your brain cell getting lonely? You want to go days out of our way just to get rid of some pests? We're already geared up for Kashyyyk."

"Yeah, well, I don't think it's your decision, bantha-breath!" Mission snapped. "Anyway, we can take a little detour if it's the right thing to do, right? Sheesh, call yourself Canderous. More like _Can't_-derous."

There was probably ten seconds of no sound except gizka noises before Canderous spoke, any hostility completely lost in boggling. "That might be the worst pun I've ever heard."

"I think Mission's hit on the eternal question with you and getting along with others, Canderous Ordo," I deadpanned, getting into the spirit of things to try to make Mission laugh. "I can never tell whether it's that you _Can't_-derous…Or-_don't_."

I thought there was a hint of appreciation in the ensuing groans, but as usual, Bastila killed the joke. "As amusing as this is, Canderous does have a point. Manaan is well out of our way at this point, Mission, and we cannot afford to wait to resolve the problem until we reach it as scheduled. I'm not terribly happy about poisoning the gizka either, but it does seem to be the best—perhaps the only—way to rid the ship of them." For all her Jedi objectivity, I would've bet big credits that the gizka currently trying to worry a hole through her leggings with its toe wasn't doing anything to help its species' case.

Mission hung her head. "Yeah, I know," she said quietly after a minute. "You're probably right, it's just—killing all of them in one swoop. While we just sit back and watch. It feels wrong. It reminds me of what the Sith did to Taris."

Canderous scoffed at that, but Juhani and Carth both looked thoughtful, even with gizka scrabbling all over their feet. Personally, I thought the metaphor was bantha fodder, but it sort of didn't matter. All I was thinking was that despite her insistence that she wasn't a kid, Mission Vao was only fourteen, and the planet she'd grown up on had recently been bombed into oblivion. And I was supposed to be…guardianing her, or whatever. If getting rid of the gizka humanely would make her happy, which would, by extension, make Zaalbar happy and put everyone else in a better mood—well, keeping morale up was a valid tactical aim too, right?

Besides, we'd done stupider sidequests. At least this one would actually benefit us, unlike, say, wasting somebody's love droid.

"T3," I asked, "any way to confirm that rumor about the zoo?"

The droid made a soft whirring noise as it scanned transmissions. Finally he came up with an answer: "Yes. The procurer is a Selkath named Nubassa."

Mission and Juhani looked at me. I looked at Bastila. Bastila, for lack of anyone with more authority to look at, gazed back at me with an air that said she knew what was coming. Our bond made it tough to pull any punches. I felt her reluctance; she felt my insistence; I felt her cave and turned to Carth. "Carth," I ordered, "plot a course for Manaan." As a Jedi, I was trying not to enjoy calling the shots too much, but it was an uphill battle.

Carth had been sympathetic, but that was a little much even for him. "Uh, just to confirm: you want me to fly this thing all the way out to Manaan so you can drop off these gizka?" he asked in a tone of voice that suggested that surely he must have misheard me.

"We're not killing them. That's final." I glanced around just to make sure everyone got the point. "We can't think of anywhere else to take them. It would be almost as much trouble to turn around and go back to Tatooine to buy the poison as it would be to push on. They need space and food, which are two things that are at a premium on this ship. So unless you're willing to keep them in _your_ quarters and share _your_ rations with them until we get around to stopping at Manaan…"

"Point taken." Carth got up. "Mind letting me out so I can get to the cockpit?" I punched the doors back open. With the meeting over, everyone gradually started drifting back to where they'd been. I sat down very carefully and examined the bottom of my boots in disgust.

"Now that I think about it..." Bastila murmured in my ear, "don't the Selkath consider gizka steak a delicacy?"

Mission, who wasn't as far out of earshot as we'd thought, gasped.

* * *

In the end I had to pay the Selkath to take the things. But he swore, under penalty of death, that the gizka would be safe and well-cared-for in the Manaan zoo. His acquisition team spent four standard hours on the Ebon Hawk catching and crating up all the gizka for transport, and a couple hours later our gizka-free ship was back in hyperspace, en route to Kashyyyk a few hundred credits poorer but dozens and dozens of passengers lighter. A fair tradeoff, for my money.

"Thanks," Mission said to me when we got back to our (gizka-free) quarters and sat down on our (gizka-free) beds. "I'm glad we did that, even if it was really out of our way."

"Don't mention it," I said. "Literally. I don't think I ever want to hear the word 'gizka' again."

She flopped back and folded her arms behind her head. After a while she said thoughtfully, "You know, now that they're gone…I kinda miss them. I guess I just got used to the noise."

"It's for the best, Mission. I'm sure they'll be happier in the zoo than they were on the ship." Not to mention I wouldn't have to check the synthesizer for them five times whenever I wanted to eat. I'd learned that lesson the hard way.

"Yeah, I know. Still, too bad we couldn't keep just one. Like a mascot, you know?" She sighed. "Oh, well."

* * *

Passing by the cargo hold later that day, I spotted a lone gizka hopping around. I nudged it into an empty supply bin where Mission wouldn't find it before I could get it off the ship at our next destination. Hopefully the little monster liked Wookiees.


	8. The Old Man and the Bantha

A/N: I have immense respect for whoever wrote Jolee's dialogue for KotOR; it's not easy to write a character who's so (obliquely) insightful and funny all the time! I hope I've done him some justice here.

You can't enter his house in the game, so I've taken a stab at what the interior might look like. The story of Argis is completely made up, but Xachibik broth and Thikkiian brandy are canonical Wookiee food and drink. And of course, I don't own KotOR or its characters.

* * *

"The Old Man and the Bantha" (Jolee, Bastila, Canderous)  
Kashyyyk, Shadowlands

* * *

We stayed with Jolee the night we met him, before he took us to the Czerka repulsor field. His house has stuck in my mind, since when he invited us in I knew almost nothing of him other than a few minutes' conversation and what I could sense, and I can remember studying the building for clues as to who this old hermit in the woods was. He'd built this place with his own hands, that much I could tell. The outer walls were lined with long light strips that looked like they might have come from a ship in another lifetime, and the door was meticulously carved out of a single huge log of wood. "How long did it take you to carve that?" I asked.

"Ten minutes. That old lightsaber might as well be good for something besides hacking off kinrath legs," he rapped back, pushing it open wide and going in. Bastila's lips tightened into a thin, deeply concerned line. I reevaluated the door with new eyes.

* * *

I remember the inside of the hut wasn't all that much warmer than the outside, but at least it was marginally less damp, and when I saw the fire blazing beneath the two chimneys, I began entertaining hopes that my boots might actually dry out for the first time since they'd hit the ground on this Force-forsaken planet.

It was one roundish room, and when Jolee'd invited us to "pull up a stump," he wasn't kidding—there was exactly one stump, and it was huge; the whole place was centered on it. It probably took up a good third of the floor. To one side was a carved wooden bed, covered in patched blankets that, like Jolee's robes, had seen better days, possibly before Bastila was born. The rest of the room was cluttered with assorted tools, cooking implements and wicker baskets—all of which might have been made by either the Wookiees or Jolee himself—and a jumble of what looked like half-ancient ship parts. Everything seemed to be part of a complex organizational scheme known only to the old man, but it didn't make for a lot of free space. If there was a fresher, I never found it.

Jolee strode ahead and began to hunt while we found room to drop our packs by the door. "I think I've got a bottle of Thikkiian brandy around here somewhere, if I can remember where I put the darned thing," he told us.

Canderous was busy trying not to look like his head hurt, although he'd bashed it on the top of the door frame on his way in. "I hope you have some graling juice on hand for the Jedi princess," he said. "We wouldn't want her to hurt herself."

"And he'll take the strongest drink you have," Bastila retorted icily. "With luck, he'll pass out quickly and we'll be spared his idea of humor."

"Hey, make us look a little worse, why don't you," I muttered to both of them. "I don't think you're trying hard enough."

Apparently I wasn't as subtle about my helpful guidance as I thought, because Jolee stopped rummaging through baskets to scowl at us over his shoulder. "You're all too young to be so argumentative. I earned the right to be as contrary as I am, dammit!"

Canderous straightened up (his healing implant must have kicked in) and asserted, "I've been fighting across the galaxy for over forty of your years."

"Pah! Sure hasn't taught you much about picking your battles, has it? Now stop yammering and sit down."

After glancing around the room and back at each other, the three of us arrayed ourselves cross-legged on top of the stump, which seemed to be both the dinner table and all the company chairs. Jolee came over and gave us each a handcarved wooden bowl and spoon and three ladlefuls of thick Xachibik broth. I inspected the meat briefly in hopes of figuring out what it used to be, then decided I was probably better off not knowing. The brandy, sadly, didn't seem to be forthcoming.

We spent the next few minutes concentrating on our food. At length, Bastila lowered her spoon and began, "Master Jedi—"

He waved a hand in irritated dismissal. "I already told you, I'm no Jedi. Just call me Jolee."

"Jolee, then. You speak as though you know this forest well."

"When you live here as long as I have, you have a fair idea of what happenings are taking place, even if the actors don't want you to know about them. I saw that gizka you released, by the way. Very bad for the local ecosystem."

"Not if it gets eaten by a tach." I decided I'd better change the subject. "You said you knew of the 'crazed Wookiee' Chuundar sent us to kill. Who is he?"

"I sensed there might be more behind your presence in the Shadowlands than a hunt for some ancient trinket. Are you planning on killing him?"

"Not unless he gives us a reason to, no. My guess is anyone Chuundar doesn't like is someone who's on our side, as long as he'll deal with outsiders," I said.

"And what do you see as 'your side'?"

I took a slow spoonful of broth to buy myself time to consider. I wasn't crazy about the direction all the information seemed to be flowing in. But Bastila had called the old man a "servant of the light" earlier, and I sensed that she'd been right. I also sensed that she felt we should trust him now; in fact, even as I was gauging her thoughts, I could feel her encouraging me. The silent conversation was over by the time I swallowed. "For a start, anyone who's not pro-enslaving-Wookiees and who's willing to help us free Zaalbar from the village. He's—"

"—Chuundar's brother," he cut me off, sounding surprised. "I was here when the boy was exiled. Terrible business. And he's with you, is he?"

"When he's not being held captive. It seems to happen to him a lot." First the Gamorreans, now this. I guess every motley crew of adventurers on an epic quest needs a designated damsel in distress, but I would've never expected ours to be two meters tall and covered in fur.

Jolee rubbed his beard thoughtfully. "Chuundar's brother. Well, well, well. It seems as if that intriguing destiny of yours I saw is already well underway. And what will you do about Chuundar?"

This time I didn't have to think about it. "Oppose him, of course. We'll find a way to expose his lies to the Wookiees and encourage them to take their planet back from Czerka. As Jedi, we can't allow atrocities like this to continue."

"No? The Jedi Council might say otherwise. Did they give you permission to enact other species' regime changes while you were looking for the maps of yours?"

"Czerka's in bed with the Sith. Our orders are to stop them, so sabotaging the corporation's efforts should be right in line with that goal. Even if it weren't, our duty as Jedi is to pursue justice in the galaxy, to protect innocents against the forces of evil, and that includes shutting down a slave trade. We don't need the Council's permission—or anyone's—to do what's right."

The conviction of my speech surprised everyone, not least of all me. Whatever I might have felt about their views on love, I didn't think I'd ever even entertained the thought of disobeying the Council before. "I see," Jolee said. His expression—in fact, his whole demeanor—was curious, but cryptic. I couldn't get any kind of handle on what he was thinking as his gaze shifted to Bastila. "Does your master agree with you?"

"I am not her master. Both of us are merely padawans," Bastila admitted.

"And I'm not interested in Wookiee politics. I'm just here for the glory of battle," Canderous added, in case anyone was interested in his spectacularly sociopathic opinion on the matter.

Jolee leaned back and stretched, which triggered a small chorus of cracking sounds from his bones. "I feel a story coming on," he said.

I was tempted to ask if that was a side effect of the Xachibik broth (I never did find out what that meat was), but valiantly applied my Jedi self-control to keeping my mouth shut. Hearing no objections, Jolee began, "This was some years ago. Probably before you two were in training, maybe even before you were born. A group of Jedi was dispatched to Tatooine and they were living in a large krayt dragon cave there."

"Why?" Bastila asked.

"Stop interrupting with stupid questions and he'll probably tell you," Canderous snapped. Then, "Go on, old man. We're listening."

"I'm surprised. I wouldn't have predicted that you'd be so interested," I whispered to him.

"Stories are important for a warrior. Sharing tales of great exploits is a way to preserve a people's honor, and to pass down their traditions and values to future generations," he replied seriously. "Besides, for once it's not like we have anything better to do."

"I don't remember why they were there; I'm old, dammit! Anyway, it isn't important. The only thing you need to know is that they were there for a while and they got bored, and one day a young Jedi named Argis decided to teach a bantha use the Force."

Bastila, who had been unstintingly respectful until then, finally cracked. "That's absurd."

"True, it would have been smarter to try to teach it to fetch his lightsaber or give itself a bath—" Jolee aimed a pointed look in our direction, as if to suggest that the bantha wasn't the only one who could have stood to work on that skill, "—but then we wouldn't have much of a story, now would we? Now be quiet and listen." Bastila dutifully closed her mouth. "Argis treated his new apprentice as he would have any other student. He meditated with it and taught it every technique he knew. And remarkably, it seemed to be working.

"The most important thing Argis trained the bantha was to use a stasis field if an enemy attacked. He'd practice by having all the Jedi run at it, and the bantha always did its job perfectly—until the day they were attacked by a group of Sand People. No one knew whether it was thrown off by the unfamiliar opponents or just startled by the Jedis' fear, but instead of remembering its training, the bantha panicked and tried to stampede out of the cave. It trampled the Jedi and the Sand People alike as it went, and in the end not a one of them was left alive."

Jolee stopped talking. "And then what?" I prompted.

"What do you mean, 'and then what'? That's all. Didn't you enjoy it?"

In point of fact, it was the worst story I'd ever heard, and it would probably still hold that title today if Jolee hadn't gone on to tell me more stories. Before I could think of something tactful to say about it, though, Bastila jumped in, fixing him with a strangely intense gaze. "Are you suggesting that a bantha's nature cannot change, or that all banthas have the same nature?"

"They're beasts. Pack animals. It was stupid to try to teach them to use the Force in the first place," Canderous said.

"No, I'm just saying that Argis should have been damn sure he knew what that bantha's nature was before he trained it," Jolee replied, pointedly ignoring the Mandalorian. "But that's just my opinion. I wouldn't presume to tell him that."

"Perhaps he didn't feel he had any choice if he wanted to protect his fellow Jedi and their mission."

"Perhaps. He might have been right, too."

"Well, if I were to aid a bantha in the use of the Force, you can be certain that_ I_ would believe absolutely in what I was doing." Bastila fell silent. After a beat or two she sniffed, "In any case, I don't believe there ever was any such Jedi."

"You believe what you want. I would never try to tell you what you should think, either." Jolee's voice was all innocence.

"And if I ask Master Dorak the next time we are on Dantooine?"

"Dorak's still there? The old coot's probably even more senile than I am. I'd be surprised if he could find his lightsaber when it was hanging off his belt, let alone remember a story like that."

"If he killed them all, how did you hear about it?" I asked.

Jolee slammed his bowl down on the stump. "You rabble ask the silliest questions I've ever heard. Go to bed and don't bother me with your prating until the morning."

Kashyyyk has twenty-six hour rotation periods, but no way to distinguish when they began or ended this many kilometers down, and I didn't know if the ship's time we were running on had anything to do with the clock he was using . "Wait," I said, "how many standard hours is it until—"

"Shoo!"

* * *

I stepped outside briefly to communicate with the Ebon Hawk, during which conversation Carth and I established that I was fine, he was fine, Mission was coping with Zaalbar's kidnapping but would probably be doing a lot better if Juhani would stop trying to grill her about whether she'd ever seen Revan on Taris (!), the droids were fine, Bastila and Canderous were fine, and we'd picked up a crazy old man who was into pointless stories. "If you need any help—" Carth offered; I told him we were making out just great down here and were sending Canderous back to the ship in the morning (only three of us out together at any given time, that was our rule to avoid attracting any more attention than we needed to from the Sith). Carth seemed less than enthused by this revelation.

When I got back inside, Jolee was in his bed and the other two had managed to carve out enough floorspace for our bedding rolls. "Just like a sleepover," I whispered with exaggerated cheer to Bastila.

She shuddered. "Don't try to shill that line again. Once was more than enough." Apparently she still hadn't quite recovered from that slumber party in the women's quarters, which is a story that might be better left buried.

I lay down—my head was wedged between the stump and her elbow and I couldn't stretch my legs out without drawing irritated curses from the Mandalorian, but at least I was slightly less likely to wake up with a kinrath trying to eat me than I had been the previous night—and tried to fall asleep. I only got about two minutes into the effort before Canderous hissed, "Hey. What do you think the old man meant by that story?"

"What do you mean 'meant'? He was trying to entertain us, and it might've worked if _someone_ didn't kill every joke she'd ever heard." Actually I couldn't think of anything that could have induced me to be entertained by that story, but I felt like messing with Bastila and aimed an affectionate jab at her ribs with my index finger. She forgot herself and squealed, smacking reflexively at my hand. That routine never got old.

"No, you Jedi love your mysticism. He was getting at something." Had he been talking to Carth, I wondered, or did everyone think being cryptic was the Jedi's idea of a spectator sport?

"He was probably warning us against bringing you with us," Bastila whispered back sharply, having recovered. "After the way you endeared yourself to the settlers on Dantooine, we're lucky you didn't join us in the Wookiee village. We'd all have been killed by bowcasters before we got five paces past the gate."

"But what a fight it would have been," said Canderous, almost dreamily—then, back in antagonism mode, "If anything, though, I'd say the old man was probably talking about you. Maybe you're secretly Malak's girlfriend and you just never got around to mentioning it."

"You are _vile_."

Time to defuse the situation. I said, "As long as we're coming up with crackpot theories, what if he was warning us about himself? He could secretly be a Dark Jedi, but we have to let him join us anyway, so he's taunting us."

From the bed came an aggravated grunt from Jolee. "Do you three never stop chattering? We have a long walk tomorrow and I'm too old to carry you if you fall asleep on your feet, so go to sleep!"

"A fine idea," Bastila said, one last jab at Canderous. There was an edge of concern to her thoughts that I couldn't figure out, but just when I opened my mouth to ask, her index finger snaked through my bedding and poked me in the ribcage. Thus avenged, she promptly fell asleep, and a minute later, so did I.

* * *

Jolee took barely anything with him when we left the next day—the patched Jedi robes on his back, the lightsaber in his hand, and a small, beat-up equipment pack which he used in the forest. In the end, he even managed to give the pack away somewhere between the village and the dock, so he came on board the Ebon Hawk about as unencumbered as any sentient being can get. Physically, anyway.

I have to admit I felt a little sad when I thought about his house out there in the Shadowlands—that door, the carved bowls and the woven rugs, probably still leftover Xachibik broth in the soup pot, twenty years of work just sitting there abandoned. I stopped him at the dock and asked him one last time if he was sure there was nothing he wanted from his place.

"Pfah," he said, "let the forest have it back."

At the time, I didn't understand how anyone could divorce himself from his past so thoroughly. I didn't know a thing.


	9. When in Dreshdae I

A/N: Extra-long update, because I had a ridiculous amount of fun with this chapter. If you've been with us thus far, you know these stories mostly focus on one or two characters in a specific situation that lasts from a few minutes to a few hours. But the crapsack planet of Korriban is so fascinating—almost a character in its own right, not to mention its love-to-hate-'em NPCs—that I did something slightly different with this one. I hope you enjoy as well!

Since I first uploaded it, I've split it into two parts for easier reading. This is the first half.

I don't own KotOR or its characters.

* * *

"When in Dreshdae," part I (HK-47, ensemble, Sith Academy NPCs)  
Korriban, Sith Academy

* * *

The dark side corrupts. I first saw it in the ancient grove on Dantooine, where Juhani's darkness drove the kath hounds mad, but I don't think I really believed it until I saw Korriban.

The Sith there were nothing like the junior officers I'd met back on Taris. With the Taris occupying force, the dark side was banal; it just wanted to cash its paycheck, get out of its uniform and drink itself into a stupor. The dark side here wanted you dead, and it was infectious. Mission spent most of her time in the cantina playing Pazaak with a bartender who later turned out to be an illegal arms dealer. Also, we'd gotten mixed up in smuggling spice.

Not exactly a vacation, let's put it that way.

* * *

There were a lot of bad days, but one of the worst came about four days into my candidacy for Sith studenthood. We'd been planetside for more than a week by then. Like all the others, that morning dawned (and don't think twenty-eight-hour days mean more time to sleep in, not if you prefer your vital organs without lightsaber holes) bright, cold and painfully dry. Unlike most of the others, on that morning I awoke to a searing pain hitting the outside of my left leg and HK standing over my bed, blaster rifle still aimed.

"Are you _crazy_?" I demanded, remembering how all of HK's previous owners had died and convinced I was about to be next in line.

"Statement: On the contrary, master. I have just saved you from paralysis and likely a subsequent assassination attempt." He gestured with the nose of the rifle to what had once been the section of sheet next to my leg; on it were the remains of a pelko bug. If you've never encountered one—and count yourself lucky if that's the case—I should explain that pelko bugs are foul little bugs that live under the sand on Korriban; they're covered in tiny barbs that deliver a painful paralyzing agent. Worse, they seek out Force users.

With surprising quickness, Jolee bolted to the doorway—no one except Uthar had an actual door to their quarters, the better to try to kill each other in cold blood—and returned a moment later, shaking his head. "Which one of your friends did that, I wonder?" he asked as he reached out to heal me.

I nodded thanks and checked my leg. Aside from a largeish hole in my leggings, it looked all right. "If I had to guess, I'd say Mekel. Lashowe doesn't have enough initiative to go catch a bug herself, and Shaardan would have just shot us."

"Query: Is Mekel the meatbag with facial hair? When we eliminate everyone in the building, master, you had better let me kill him first so he doesn't alert the others. He looks like a screamer."

"Ooh, good plan," Jolee said. "Is that before or after we loot precious artifacts, murder innocents and take candies from babies? Please just go easy on the beatings, master."

How did I always end up getting blamed for the droid's sociopathic programming? "We are not going to slaughter the whole academy, HK," I said for the dozenth time.

But he was right: in the end, the circumstances made a liar of me. Ironically, Mekel was one of the few who'd make it out.

* * *

We returned to the Ebon Hawk first thing, so I could check in with Bastila without any Sith eavesdropping and so someone else could relieve Jolee. On Korriban the others rotated almost every day to keep any one person—especially a Jedi—from being in what Bastila referred to as "a wretched hive of scum and villainy" for too long. HK was the only constant, partly because it made sense for a Sith student to keep an assassination droid on hand but mostly because every day in Korriban was like his birthday. At least someone was enthusiastic about the place.

Bastila and I met alone in the women's quarters, which triggered wistful memories on my part of the days before I started waking up in bed with pelko bugs. Actually I didn't have any information to give her that couldn't have been relayed just as well by one of the others, but talking to her kept me—well, in a word, "grounded." Or "sane."

I gave her what news I had, expecting her to answer with her thoughts as usual. But she didn't. All she said was, "What's troubling you?"

"Aside from all the people trying to kill me, you mean?"

"Yes. That I imagine you're used to by now."

The feeling of unease had been building for days, but this was the first time I'd tried to articulate it, even to myself. "When I was accepted as a prospective student…" I began slowly, "I thought I'd barely last the day. I was so sure they'd all sense that I was strong in the light side of the force." She nodded, encouraging me to go on. "But Uthar, Yuthura, even the other students keep saying they feel this—darkness from me."

I barely had time to pick up on her flicker of—what? concern? fear?—before she quashed it and was calm again. "Forgive me," she said. "You know I worry about everything." Her smile was slightly rueful. "But we all have darkness in us, even Jedi, and those who have given into it themselves are more inclined to see it in others. Just remain on the correct path and you'll have nothing to worry about."

On the contrary, I thought we'd have plenty to worry about even if I became so light no one could look directly at me, but she was trying to reassure me. "I'll try," I promised. "But these people, Bastila! Every time they open their mouths I have to stop my fists from clenching."

"You know, when I was in training and lost my temper, my master used to throw a bucket of water on me. Shall I fill one for HK-47 to carry before you go? Perhaps we could get him to curb violence for once instead of inciting it."

"He'd just throw it at a Sith and get us all skewered." As heartening as Bastila's attempts at humor were, we needed to get going. I got to my feet. "Well, I'll see you later," I said casually, as if I weren't about to plunge right back into the heart of darkness. Instead of replying, Bastila moved to the floor and went to her knees, resuming her meditation. I felt my mind fill with a quiet warmth, one I focused hard on as I got ready to go back out into the cold.

* * *

I ate a quick breakfast standing at the synthesizer—I didn't relish defending my rations with my life during mealtimes at the academy—and prepared to leave again with Juhani and HK. For once I actually tried to avoid running into Carth, but he cornered me on the exit ramp with an expression so earnest that just looking at it hurt. "Have you seen any sign of Dustil?" he asked.

Oh, hell, I didn't want to have this conversation. Again. "You were there almost all day yesterday, and I came straight here this morning," I pointed out quietly.

"So you haven't looked at all since I left?"

"You know, I admit I've been slightly distracted by the trivial task of _trying to get to the Star Map so we can save the galaxy_." I shouldn't have said that, I knew as soon as I did. The man was desperate and it wasn't fair to snap at him for it, but for Force's sake—

"And saving my son isn't important, is that it?"

"Carth, what do you want me to do, barge into every room in the building until I find him? He will turn up, I promise."

"Damn it!" The bottom of his fist banged as it hit metal, and the accompanying wave of frustration made me wince like he'd punched my stomach instead of the wall. He noticed and raked the hand through his hair as a cooling-off gesture, grimacing. "Look, I'm sorry, I'm just on edge—"

"I know." We stood in silence for a moment while I fumbled for the right thing to do and finally came up with the same thing I'd been telling him ever since we'd met Jordo back on Kashyyyk: "We'll find him, Carth. You just have to trust me." But it sounded less convincing every time I said it, so then all I could do was turn and follow the others out, leaving Carth by himself on the ramp.

* * *

HK was in high spirits on the walk back. We were barely out of the dock when he started providing his special brand of unsolicited advice: "Suggestion: The most efficient solution would be to take one of the Sith organic meatbags hostage and demand information, master. I could shoot a different body part for every failure to provide useful intelligence. Statement: You might find that a little violence would cheer you up. It always does me."

"Shut it, droid," I snapped. If only I'd taken Bastila up on that bucket-of-water suggestion.

Juhani tried to slip her fingers reassuringly into mine but failed because mine were curled around my lightsaber hilts, as a preemptive warning to any other Sith who might mistake me for a walking comedy hour. She pulled back and let her hand drop to her side instead. "We must remain strong, Padawan," she whispered. "This is but a test. We will resist the influence of the dark side in this place and emerge untouched by it."

The words were barely out of her mouth when our path was blocked by something that felt like a wall of darkness and looked like a nasty little man with a big mouth. He rounded on Juhani and demanded, "What the hell is your kind doing here?"

* * *

Ten minutes later, I was leading her to my quarters in the academy while she shook with rage. "My Cathar blood seethes at the thought of that man still running free," she spat through clenched teeth.

"Commentary: It might still be possible to go after him, master. He did not appear to be heavily armed. I recommend that you begin by searching the cantina and—"

Tempting thought, not that I was going to give the droid the satisfaction of hearing that. "Caution: Go buy yourself a tact upgrade, HK, or I'm gonna rewire you until the most violent thing you do for the rest of your existence will be the laundry."

"Apology: Shutting up now."

"Hello—oh. Is something wrong with your friend there?" I looked up to see Kel Algwinn: nicest guy on the planet, worst Sith of all time.

"I—it is nothing," Juhani said. "I feel—unwell. It will pass."

"Oh. Well. If there's—you know, anything I can do to help—" Kel stopped and tried, with a profound lack of success, to backtrack: "I mean, I'm competing against your, um, master here, not you." Even Bastila would make a better Sith than he did, I thought.

"Thanks," I mouthed, shuffling her past him—Kel, one of the only Sith who walked out of that light-forsaken place, part of a pathetic handful of success stories. Shaardan was leaving his quarters as we entered mine, but that almost didn't register, not then.

"I cannot stand still while I think about it!" Juhani exploded as soon as we were inside. HK's visual sensors glowed joyously, which Juhani correctly interpreted as a bad thing and which made her hasten to add, "—but I will not give into the dark side, either." HK looked almost crestfallen, for a droid. "He will pay for his crimes, though." Immediately the viciousness was right back.

"Shh," I hissed in her ear, so softly I almost couldn't hear myself. "There is no emotion…" She closed her eyes and recited it to herself with her lips barely moving. Midway through the second time, her breathing slowed and the anger in her face began to drain. I went over the words in my head too and felt myself relaxing just a little. A few months earlier I would've thought you were crazy if you told me repeating the Jedi Code could be a recreational activity.

"Do you want to go back to the ship?" I asked after a few minutes.

"No. No, we should press on and attempt one of the tasks in the Valley of the Dark Lords." She stood up and reached out to pull me to my feet. "Come. I am confident we will be successful, if for no other reason that this day cannot get any worse."

Famous last words.


	10. When in Dreshdae II

A/N: Hello, everyone! If you were here earlier, you know that the Korriban story was significantly longer than any of the others, so I've divided it into two parts for easier reading. This is part two.

I don't own KotOR or its characters.

* * *

"When in Dreshdae," part II (HK-47, ensemble, Sith Academy NPCs)  
Korriban, Sith Academy

* * *

We barely even made it out the back door before she was proven horribly wrong. Waiting behind the academy to greet us were three Sith—two unfamiliar students in academy uniforms and their obvious leader, a bald man with a full set of fiber armor (which disperses energy; obviously he traveled prepared) and the most idiotic goatee I'd ever seen. There was something familiar about him, but I couldn't quite place the face.

"At last, my search is over," said the leader. "I was beginning to fear someone else had killed you and deprived me of the pleasure. You may have defeated the pathetic bounty hunter my Master sent after you, but you are no match for me! I have studied at the foot of the Dark Lord himself!"

During this monologue I remembered where I'd seen that stupid kriffing goatee before—back on the Endar Spire. He was the one Trask had held off so I could get to the escape pods. "You're Malak's apprentice?" I scoffed. Your average Sith would rather take a lightsaber to the eyeball than be laughed at. "Can't say I'm impressed."

Doubtless this witticism cut him to the quick, but Bandon managed to keep from giving any sign of how deeply he was wounded. "Your words mean nothing to me, unless you wish to beg for your life," he said. I unhooked my lightsabers. "No? Then I shall try to make this both quick and painful."

HK threw the first fire grenade before he'd even finished talking. It exploded just behind them as they charged forward, obviously doing little damage to the students beyond some lightly charred uniforms and even less to Bandon. Juhani leapt to meet one of the sidekicks while HK went for the other, leaving me with Malak's apprentice.

I tried to impose a Stasis Field centered on Bandon and felt in response not just strength, but active resistance against it. The second attempt had the same effect, and after the third failure he was almost on me and I didn't have time to try again. It was like trying to punch a duracrete wall with your bare knuckles—and while there might be Jedi who can do that, it's never been the direction my abilities have run, trust me. It was going to come down to a lightsaber duel.

The obvious thing about a double-bladed saber is that it requires maneuverability, even more than a pair of single sabers. Out in the open his reach was longer than mine and he had the advantage, but if I could drive him back into a corner— I'd just have to trust Juhani and HK to keep the two Sith off my exposed back.

We met almost in the center of the open space, lightsabers clashing and then pressing hard against each other as we went into the inevitable test of strength. Up close, Bandon's face approached menacing, with the darkness there overriding any thoughts about his shaving abilities. He probably had the advantage, but I wasn't going to keep going until he could force the beams back down on me; I ducked out first and spun around behind him, which let me get both a sharp hit in at the base of his spine and my back to the valley instead of his. My plan was to work him back into the gap between the academy door and one of the towering statues to its left.

It wasn't an easy task. Malak must have been a good teacher (any why not; he'd learned from the best), because in addition to resisting most of the Force powers I could throw at him, Bandon was no slouch with a lightsaber. I had to dodge spins and aerial flips and get my own blows in where I could, but I made slow but steady progress, especially once I got a stim into my system—I don't know what; first thing I grabbed. What really worked for me was his overconfidence. I could see the tension in his face: he'd thought I'd go down easily and I wasn't. Typical Sith.

Two meters from the corner, I swung at him with both sabers, trying to force him to keep his own weapon up to block instead of attacking. A spare arm still clad in a gray Sith sleeve flew between us—woe betide the fool who attacks a Cathar Jedi on a bad day. It gave me the opening I needed, and I swung my right saber up high to feint at Bandon's head. He made to spin his lightsaber horizontally to block me, but the tip of one beam caught the statue's leg, throwing his attack off course. With one last burst of effort, I slammed my lightsabers against his and drove him back to the wall. The dirt there was uneven, and with no room for his spins and flips, I could swing almost freely as long as I stood my ground. His only free range was vertically in front of him. I battered hard against his armor, and even with the energy dispersion, I could feel that I was doing some damage.

But Malak's apprentice didn't give up just because he was boxed in. He kept hammering all three of us over and over again with a technique which I later learned was called Death Field but which, at the time, just felt like three different kinds of agony. And every time he did it, he seemed to get stronger. Juhani must have been healing me, because what I remember is striking, just striking as fast and as hard as I could, hoping his Force energy would wear out before my arms.

And it was working, too. Before long I got into a rhythm and I was slashing faster than he could drain us, landing most of my blows around his lightsaber while he got only a few hits in. Even the Death Field became more bearable as I fell into the sweet spot of battle, easier to recover from. Before I knew it, he was half-slumped in the corner, at my mercy, and I burst out, "This'll be a nice warm-up for when I kill your master!" I still can't say what possessed me to taunt him; maybe it was just the darkness of Korriban talking—but either way it was a stupid move, because that was when Bandon did the unexpected and Force Choked me.

My left-hand lightsaber clattered to the dirt as I clutched involuntarily at my throat. No amount of Jedi training can completely kill the sheer panic you feel when the air's being crushed from your windpipe. It didn't end; I stood clawing helplessly at the air for an eternity and still it kept going. He moved his arm and this time it was my spine slamming hard into the stone wall, and I can remember thinking dimly, this is it, Malak's going to win, and I'm about to die at the hands of the man with the stupidest kriffing goatee in the galaxy. This is it.

He let go and I crumpled to the ground, not even thinking about trying to find my missing weapon, just choking and gasping in air. I looked up with blurred vision to see Bandon, coldly triumphant smile in place, raising his lightsaber above me for the killing blow—and then I saw what was behind him and buried my head in my arms. Just in time to avoid the worst of the shrapnel from the frag grenade that went off right against the back of Darth Bandon's bald head.

"Statement: Now this is more like it master. What with all these non-violent solutions of yours, it has been far too long since I last killed an actual meatbag." HK lowered his grenade-throwing arm. "I was beginning to go through withdrawal."

* * *

For once I didn't have a comeback for him, being a) still out of breath and b) mostly underneath the now-deceased Darth Bandon. Juhani came over to help dig me out. "I am glad you are all right, Padawan, but goading that man was very foolish. I do not imagine many have taunted the apprentice of the Dark Lord and lived," she said. She was right, of course; Bastila would have been furious.

"Nnnghh," I think I answered, fumbling along the ground for my lightsaber. The two Sith students were sprawled some distance away, neither one of them moving, one with a decidedly non-standard number of attached limbs. I pulled myself into a sitting position and had barely started rifling through Bandon's possessions when my portable communicator went off. "Hello, master," Carth's voice greeted me, a sentence that under better circumstances might have sounded pretty good but right now was just depressing.

Mission burst in before I even got my mouth open. It must be the arms dealer's lunch break. "Hey, listen, we've got something really important to tell you! We—"

There was a strange shadow falling out from behind one of the statues. Juhani and I locked eyes. "Why are you bothering me, slaves?" I demanded, praying that Mission would get that we were being overheard. "This had better be important."

"Wh—oh. Oh, uh, sorry, master. But it _is_ important—really important! We caught a stowaway on the ship!"

"Looks like one of your buddies from the academy," Carth cut in. "Zaalbar and Canderous have him locked up in the men's quarters where he can do the least damage."

"Who?" I asked, much louder than necessary to mask the sound of Juhani's lightsaber extending.

"He says his name's Shaardan, and he came on the ship to try to find something that would make you look bad in front of Uthar," Mission replied. "It's amazing what people will tell you when a Wookiee's threatening to sit on them."

The shadow was still there. Juhani crept silently toward the statue. "How far did he get?"

"Uh, all the cargo is safe, master," Carth said, which I took to mean Shaardan hadn't found Bastila. "What do you want us to do with him?"

I considered. The smart thing to do would be to kill him. Canderous could as soon shoot him as look at him, and if the others didn't like it, at least that would make one fewer Sith in the galaxy who was out for our heads. Chances were good no one would even mourn him.

"Let him go," I ordered. "Send him back to the academy. Tell him to watch his step, because I'm going to deal with him personally." There was still a chance he could be redeemed.

Mission sounded relieved. "Okay. And look, this guy's trying not to ask you again but he looks like he's gonna explode, so could you tell us if you've seen—"

Juhani sprang forward with a cry and slashed down with her lightsaber, but the eavesdropper bolted just before she struck and took off running. I just managed to catch sight of a pale figure with black hair before he disappeared down the path to the valley. Mekel. Juhani moved to chase him, but I called after her, "Let him go too." The last thing we needed was another fight.

"What? What's happening?" Carth demanded over the communicator.

"Explanation: Once again we have failed to solve a problem with violence." HK let out a mechanical sigh. "Now that we've dispatched a few Sith, I have no doubt my master will insist that we go around handing out flowers to all the rest of them to make amends. Lamentation: Truly, the life of an assassination droid is a difficult one."

"I'll fill you all in later," I told them, closing the connection before either of them had time to ask who we'd dispatched. With an effort, I got to my feet. My neck still hurt. HK, despite his wailing and gnashing of circuits, wasn't going to be assassinating so much as a kinrath pup without repairs, and Juhani didn't look much better than I felt. The path to the valley looked long and dusty, and the more I thought about the prospects of eliminating rogue assassin droids and playing fetch for Sith artifacts, the less I found myself giving a damn.

"You know," I said, "let's call it a day."

* * *

We rested in the afternoon with HK standing guard. In the evening I reported to Yuthura on the day's progress, which wasn't much. Just as Bastila usually did—and wasn't that a strange comparison—she took everything in and then offered her advice. "I have heard reports that you return to your ship almost every day to switch slaves," was how she began that day. In retrospect, I would be surprised by the dispassionate way she always referred to them, given that she'd once been a slave herself. "You must not be too dependent on them, or indeed on anyone. Ultimately a Sith must stand alone, as you will do when you face the trials in the tomb of Naga Sadow. And overreliance on your retinue will make you appear weak to the other competitors."

"All part of my plan, master," I said. "If they see me as weak, they'll become overconfident and let down their guard, making them that much easier to defeat."

This was obviously complete bantha poodoo, but it must have sounded better than I thought because Yuthura bought it. "Hmm…a viable strategy. Just make sure it does not damage your standing in the eyes of Master Uthar."

"My deeds will prove my worth." I bowed and started toward the exit.

"My student," she called after me. I stopped and turned back. "We were expecting Darth Bandon, the apprentice of Darth Malak, to arrive today to dine with Master Uthar. I am told he is a tall man with a shaven head and fiber armor. Tell me, have you seen him?"

She'd forgotten the stupid kriffing goatee, but I didn't think it would be wise to bring that up. "No, Master Yuthura," I lied.

She studied me for a moment, then simply said, "Ah. For some reason I thought you might have," in a tone that was impossible to read.

When they found the bodies a few hours later, practically every Sith in the academy tried to claim the credit, but no one could produce the apprentice's double-bladed lightsaber. I heard later that the whole thing rapidly descended into the kind of petty infighting that was endemic to that place, which probably would have gotten them all killed someday if they'd lived long enough. For my part, I quietly headed down to The Drunk Side and fobbed a set of fiber armor off on Lurze Kesh to see what the black market could do with it.

* * *

No sign of Shaardan that day; he'd be smart to stay in his hole and lick his wounds for a while. We were heading back to my quarters when a sharp voice rang out behind me: "I hear you didn't earn any prestige today, little Jedi. Not that it matters. You're going to lose eitherway."

I didn't have to turn around to know who that was dogging our steps like a starving kath hound, so I didn't turn around at all, which I knew she'd hate. Lashowe and I were buddies. At least as much as two people who insult each other every time they enter the same room, are on opposite sides of a war, and wouldn't lose all that much sleep over stabbing each other in the throat can be.

"And what have you done so far today, aside from standing around seeking attention from anyone who walks by?"

"I see your jokes haven't improved any since Dreshdae. Have a care that they don't get worse, or I might have to slit your throat and paint your walls with my blood."

"Not if I cut off your arms and use them as a display stand for my lightsabers first," I said Sithishly.

"Is it truly necessary to bait this misguided woman in this way?" Juhani whispered, which I thought was a little rich coming from the only person present who'd _actually_ cut off anyone's arms that day.

"Explanation: Such statements seem to be a standard form of greeting in this institution, fur-covered meatbag." HK could barely restrain his glee. "I like it here."

This was true, in fact. I never got why using each other's corpses as décor points was such a big theme with the Sith at the academy, but I guess every school has its little quirks.

"Have you thought about my offer for the holocron?" I asked Lashowe. Bastila's advice had been to play along with Yuthura's plans for now in hopes that I'd be able to redeem her, hopefully both of them. It still pains me that we didn't get Lashowe; all that banter would've really shaken things up on Dantooine. I remember trying to talk to her during the skirmish, but she just kept swinging.

"I try not to. Every time I think of it, I can't help but burst into laughter at how foolish you are if you think I'm going to let you gain any prestige by capitalizing on my hard work."

I kept walking. "I didn't ask for an account of your self-control issues, Lashowe."

"I've changed my mind. I think I'll use you to dye a new set of robes when _I_ become a full Sith."

"Supplication: May I blast her now, master? It would be nice to utilize my considerable skills on an actual meatbag for once, although a blaster rifle is admittedly not ideal for dispatching lightsaber users." HK appeared to consider this. "Suggestion: Perhaps I could stun her while you cut her limbs off."

"Just ignore her, HK, we need to—" was as far as I got before plowing straight into someone who was crossing my path and nearly sending both of us crashing painfully to the ground. "Watch where you're going, you flea-ridden son of a bantha!" I snapped in character before I even looked to see who it was, and as I regained my balance, I found myself staring right into the face of a younger Carth Onasi.

Of course it wasn't really—his shoulders weren't as broad as Carth's, and he looked like he wasn't quite done growing into his facial features—but the resemblance was unmistakable. This had to be him. Same hair, same eyes. Even their voices had a similar note to them, although I couldn't imagine Carth snarling, "An ex-Jedi? Get out of my way before I decide to make you."

He radiated anger. Par for the course around there; most of the Sith students gave you the impression that life had done them very wrong somewhere along the way and they were going to spend every waking moment paying it back, but not like this. Carth's son, I thought wildly, how could they look so alike but feel so utterly opposed? But that close to him, I thought I sensed something else—not to mention he was the first break from the detached-body-part school of interior decorating I'd met, which I wanted to think said something. I tried to catch Juhani's eye, but the significance of what was going on didn't seem to register with her; all her expression suggested was that she hoped I wasn't going to get myself stabbed. Me too.

I didn't want to antagonize Onasi Jr. any more than I had to, so I backed down, aware that every Sith in the room was watching and reading it as weakness. "Oh, run along; I'm feeling generous. Today," I said, sidestepping to let the young man pass. He shot me a last, spiteful glance and brushed by. I watched him carefully as he continued down the hall toward the dormitory and took a left at the first fork. Ah-ha.

Lashowe laughed, exaggeratedly long and loud. "Most impressive. If you're that graceful and merciless all the time, I can't think why you're not Dark Lord of the Sith already."

"Who's that boy, Lashowe?" I barked. "I want to know his name before I rip out his entrails and use them as throw pillows."

"Oh, him? Dustil Onasi. He's supposed to be a promising young Sith, but I heard he's been a walking corpse ever since his little girlfriend kicked it," Lashowe drawled. She was wearing her favorite expression, a smirk so smug she must practice it in front of the mirror every morning. "How pathetic."

"Truly." I was already on my way to the front door, with Juhani and HK running to keep up.

"Hey," Lashowe called after me. "Where's that slave of yours from yesterday, the handsome one? When I get into the academy and you don't, I think I'll take him from you as a victory prize. I bet he'll prefer playing for the winning team, don't you?"

"If your big mouth doesn't get you killed in the next twenty minutes, you can ask him yourself," I shouted over my shoulder. "I'm on my way to get him right now."


	11. Caffa and Plasma

A/N: Oh, man, I think I confused people with the abrupt ending of the last chapter! Sorry, it wasn't intended to be a cliffhanger. I wanted to cover one day in Korriban, and I cut it off at night right before the encounter with Dustil because a) canon does a good job with it and I didn't think I could improve it, and b) it's discussed again in this chapter. But if you read this and still feel like you didn't get what you wanted out of Korriban, drop me a PM or a review and I'll try to fill in some gaps.

This next story fits pretty tightly in the game's chronology, so some notes to clarify the timeline in case you haven't played it recently: Our narrator underwent her final test at the Sith academy early in the morning of the day on which this chapter takes place. After finding the fourth of five Star Maps, she fought Uthar and Yuthura, with the end result that neither of the Sith masters returned to the academy (under what circumstances I'll leave for you to decide). Revan, HK-47 and Carth were thus forced to fight their way out of the academy in what Wookieepedia and I refer to as the "Skirmish on Korriban," also mentioned in the last chapter. They made it to the Ebon Hawk., which immediately left the planet. Both Carth and Revan spent the next few hours in the ship's medical bay, where they had the game's conversations in which Carth resolves to live after getting revenge on Saul and to try to protect Revan from the peril he fears lies ahead. They also had the famous I-could-get-the-same-kind-of-attention-from-a-blaster-rifle exchange.

Our story opens later that night. I hope you enjoy.

P.S.—I did think about calling this "Trust III," but I decided that would just be too cruel to you all.

----

"Caffa and Plasma" (Carth)

Ebon Hawk, en route Korriban—Manaan

----

I sloshed half of one of the damn mugs of hot caffa over my hand trying to get them both to the cockpit. Evidently I'd been distracted while I was pouring. Not that it mattered, because on some subconscious level I was aware that the caffa was a pretty half-hearted pretext to begin with. And luckily it wasn't hot enough to burn my hand—just my ego, because I was frantically trying to lick the worst of it off my fingers when Carth turned around. His eyebrows shot up.

"Just made caffa," I said, straightening up like nothing had happened. "You want some?"

"This late?"

"Least transgressive thing I've done in weeks." Less so than, say, letting the cockpit door close behind me, which I'd also just done.

He laughed. "You've got a point there. Sure, I'll have a cup, thanks."

I handed him the mug I hadn't half-emptied on myself. I hadn't bothered bringing him anything to sweeten it, since he never did—a spartan habit, picked up in the fleet, maybe. For some reason I imagined his wife would've liked her caffa sweeter. She probably bought them matching mugs on the same shopping trip she'd picked up that damn jacket.

I needled myself with that thought while I surreptitiously wiped my fingers on the edge of my robe and while he drank, keeping the mug carefully away from the consoles, then got up. "Have a seat," he offered.

"How many times have I been in here?" I asked.

"I've been a little lax with the guest book, but plenty."

"And how many of those times have I kicked you out of your chair?" None, that was how many. There was something oddly sacred about those seats.

"You could always take Bastila's."

I snorted into my caffa. "I'm not that brave. The second I sat down, she'd probably feel it and come Force Push me out into open hyperspace." I was only half-kidding.

It felt so good, so easy just to be leaning on the door frame and laughing. One of my favorite things about Carth was how many levels he could operate on simultaneously—he had this knack of flirting or joking about nothing without losing his essential serious-mindedness. Right then I needed someone who'd been there for the skirmish but didn't need to strike up a post-mortem on it.

What I really wanted was to continue the conversation we'd been having earlier, which had been both intensely fun and intensely serious before Juhani had walked by and I'd jumped back guiltily—as if talking to a crewmate were some kind of cardinal Jedi sin, which in present circumstances it might well be. But I wasn't sure how to work us back around to it.

"That bond of yours is that strong?" Carth asked. He moved aside, still gesturing for me to take his chair. I caved and found it was comfier than I'd expected—low, long back, still warm. Carth slid down the wall and took a seat on the floor with an air of deliberate nonchalance.

"Is that jealousy I'm hearing?" I wondered aloud.

"And if I told you it was?"

I studied him over the rim of my caffa mug, trying to figure out the ratio of joke to serious gripe in that one. Serious seemed to be up. "I'd tell you it's not all it's cracked up to be. You should never know someone so well you can tell from halfway across a ship if they're stealing your chair."

"Maybe not, but it sure would make it easier to understand people."

Distressingly, I found myself slipping into a Bastila-esque Jedi lecture mode without even thinking about it, which in hindsight probably proved my point about being too much in someone else's head. "Having an idea of what someone's feeling isn't the same as understanding them, or even liking them. It might cut down on the mystique, but you still have to put some work in to figure out what makes someone tick."

I'd put in some work—okay, a lot of work, almost an embarrassing amount of work—into figuring out what made Carth tick, so I didn't need Jedi senses to interpret his suddenly wistful frown or the way his grip tightened on the mug. He was thinking about Dustil again.

"He looked—happier when he left. At, at least, I think so. It's hard to say," he ventured after a moment of silence, sure enough.

Oh, right, I hadn't had a chance to ask about yesterday yet. "So the transport got off okay?"

"Yeah. He said the Sith wouldn't bother coming after a handful of wayward students. If they're too weak to cut it, they're better off leaving anyway, is the idea. He had a couple of others with him too."

"All because of Selene?" I asked. "It's like they didn't have a clue what they were getting into."

"Dustil sure didn't. I don't think he cared all that much about the power; I mean, he was never the kind of kid who had to be the king of the sandbox. But he said himself why he was there: the Sith gave him a family."

I got very preoccupied with moving my empty mug out of the way—a white lie of omission, because he had to have known. They all did. And the kind of desperation you'd need to think of the Sith as a family with that knowledge was staggering. I hadn't told Carth anything about that morning's final test that he hadn't already gleaned from the aftermath, but I knew that Dustil and every one of his friends would have killed someone they knew in the tomb of Naga Sadow, just like I had.

In fact, I knew he'd known, because what he'd said the day before clicked into place in hindsight. Dustil had found me in an empty corridor in the afternoon, after I'd been announced as the chosen candidate and before he and his friends took off. He'd gotten right in my face—a smarter way to pass information than it sounds; any Sith who saw us would think we were just talking trash—and hissed, "Master Yuthura uses a short lightsaber."

I'd smirked and let my right hand fall to my lightsaber hilt. "Why tell me?" I had whispered back.

"Master Uthar's datapad. He thinks she's getting too dangerous, and your final test is tomorrow. I'm sure you can do the math, Jedi."

I could, and the numbers were in my favor. Nothing to convince someone to leave the Sith than their master trying to kill them. "What about Uthar?" I had asked.

He hadn't been able to hide the surprise that disrupted his practiced sneer before he put it back into place. "Double-bladed. He likes spin-jumps and dark Force powers too. But it would be stupid to fight him; he's too powerful."

The same fighting style as the dearly departed Darth Bandon, I thought, all right. "You're underestimating the power of the light side. We didn't come here to get killed," I'd said in a low voice. Dustil's gaze had instantly started darting around the hallway, which luckily was still deserted. No fool, that kid, he knew how dangerous the words I was trusting him with were there.

"Yeah, well," he'd begun, sounding so much like Carth it was jarring, "that's your business. I've told you what I know, and in a few hours, I'll be out of here for good."

Dustil had turned sharply away in the classic Sith you're-not-worth-my-time gesture, and was about to leave when I grabbed his arm. At a distance, it would have looked like I was insulting him, but what I said was, "Your father's a good man, Dustil."

He'd probably have preferred an insult. Dustil's eyes had narrowed, and suddenly he was the one doing the math, trying to figure out what my angle was, probably weighing whether that was supposed to be motherly advice from an aspiring Mrs. Onasi. I kept my gaze level, serious, let him sense what he could. "Maybe the way the Jedi define 'good,'" he'd said finally. "By my definition—well, I guess we'll see, won't we?"

He'd spun on his heel and started walking. I wanted to call after him, tell him "May the Force be with you" or something equally inspiring, but in the end I'd kept my mouth shut. The kid didn't need anything from me.

----

"I gave him all the credits I had," Carth said, pulling my attention back to the cockpit. "To be honest, I wasn't sure he'd take them, but he did. I just don't know what he's going to do on Telos. There's—there's not much left there, except a whole lot of ways for him to get in trouble again."

"He'll be all right, Carth," I said, because that was one Dustil-related statement I could feel fairly confident about. "He's rough around the edges, but I get the feeling he takes after his father in some good ways."

"Let's just hope they don't include all the fighting. I'd like to think he'll finish growing up in a safer galaxy than we did." Carth drained the last of the caffa and set his mug off to one side with mine. They were both a deeply questionable shade of purple—Davik's leftovers—but I thought they looked a little better by virtue of being a matched pair. He looked at them and then back at me. "I should thank you again. Tearing that place up for something to convince him the way you did, and what you said to him—I—I owe you a lot, I really do."

"No, you don't, Carth."

"I'm being serious here."

"So am I. I don't know if you've noticed, but I stopped tallying debts a long time ago."

That got a small smile out of him. "Oh, yeah? Who was winning?"

"If I'd known your ego needed stroking that badly, flyboy, I would've kept score. It just didn't seem worth it after the first five times we saved each other's butts back on Taris." I kept my voice deliberately light. "The standings might be in your favor after today."

"You took down a lot more of them than I did," Carth replied.

That was one of the few days I'd have rather he'd led the kill count. I'd eaten meals with those students, helped them get prestige, exchanged threats of excruciating creativity. I didn't know why I was so kriffing sentimental about people who would cheerfully have stabbed me in the throat.

"I—um. Fight better when you're around," I said in the most stunningly inane and honest statement of the week. Maybe all time.

Because that's the only way a guy you could kill three different ways without leaving your chair can really protect you, in the end—by standing with you. Part of the reason we'd had it so hard in the skirmish was that he and HK had been going up against lightsabers with blasters; no sane tactician would have planned that, not even me (we hadn't expected to fight the whole Academy when I came back). But even if another Jedi would have been able to fight smarter, I couldn't quantify the confidence having him there at my back had given me. If I'd been able to say what I was feeling at the time, it would have been something like, "You're my Battle Meditation."

So it's a damn good thing I was feeling tongue-tied, because seriously, who _says_ things like that?

I'd thought all the intensity of our conversation earlier would seem ridiculous once we weren't half-dead in the medical bay, but there I was, right back to it. I couldn't hear anything from the rest of the ship—no tonk-tonk-tonk of footsteps, no doors sliding open or shut, no droids beeping or clanks from the workbench. Everyone must have settled in for the night. They'd be missing me in the women's quarters.

"Taris," he mused, shifting the subject—out of tact or maybe embarrassment, I wasn't sure. "Feels like a lifetime ago, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, it does." Strange how wistfully I thought of it right then: just the two of us in that apartment with that skyline, before I could remember ever even having seen a lightsaber in person. Which just goes to show you the tricks memory can play on your mind, because at the time Taris had been a xenophobic, classist cesspool full of enemies and my only company had been the most paranoid spacer ever to put on an ugly jacket. "Never thought I'd have to put up with you for this long," I cracked.

"Hey, I—I've gotten better, haven't I? At least I'm not sleeping in full armor anymore."

"I wouldn't know." I flashed him an exaggeratedly sweet smile. "But I was actually talking about your socks. Have you washed those things since Taris, or do you think your sweat is lucky?" I just wanted to rib him; his socks weren't _that_ bad. Usually.

He stood up and stretched, rolling his eyes at me. "See, now this is what I was talking about earlier. A blaster rifle. All you need is a red lightsaber and I don't think I'd be able to tell you apart from one."

"Oh, that's harsh. When's the last time a blaster brought you caffa?"

Carth smirked back at my mock-pout. "All right, that's one."

"I'm better at Pazaak than a blaster rifle would be."

"Not by much. You lost 200 credits in the Dreshdae cantina this week, remember?"

Oh, yeah, in between killing terentateks and killing everything else that moved. "I still think that Rodian was cheating. Okay, swoop racing, then."

"That I'll buy. Anything else?"

"Okay, this is a lot of work for a throwaway line. How about, 'Unlike a blaster rifle, I'm charming and I look great in Jedi robes'?"

He laughed. "Feeling a little full of ourselves tonight, are we?"

Damn straight, I thought. Considering how banged-up I'd been a few hours earlier, I should be winning galactic beauty pageants just by virtue of being able to stand. "And I'm self-cleaning," I suggested dryly. "Why is this all about me, anyway; you're the one who's spitting plasma bolts here. What do you have to offer that a blaster rifle doesn't?" He was still smirking. I got up and jabbed him playfully in the chest with an index finger.

He caught my hand. "I'm flying the ship, sister."

I jerked it free. "The ship's flying itself right now, pig-man."

"Ouch. Well, then, I guess you'll just have to try me."

Damn, why hadn't I thought of that line. Not to be outdone, I said quickly, "I'm having a rush of inspiration. I think I could probably manage to think of a couple more things. If you were interested."

One of his eyebrows quirked up. "I'm all ears."

"Too bad," I said. "Those weren't the body parts I was thinking of." And I pulled him close and kissed him.

And it was gorgeous. I reveled in the softness of his hair where I'd woven my fingers into it to bring his head down to me and in the solid warmth of his body, which was pressed against mine all the way down to the floor. His lips were surprisingly soft too, and deliciously inviting—especially after he got over what must have been a moment of shock and parted to let my tongue slip in to meet his. Even the roughness of the permastubble felt enticing. He slid his arms around me and braced my back with strong, blaster-callused hands, and for a second there I thought I might just melt into an ecstatic puddle and ruin the cockpit floor for good.

Then it was over and we were staring at each other, Carth looking as thrown off as I felt, both of us trying to process what the hell had just happened.

Everything before it had just been offhand, joking innuendo or flirtation sublimated in casual insults, nothing that couldn't be plausibly denied to ourselves or anyone else. But on a ship with only ten passengers and a months-long quest to save the galaxy, a kiss changes things. Suddenly it was obvious that we were going to have to say _something_ about the tension that had been dogging us almost as long as the Sith had.

Jedi Code, I was thinking. Dead wife. Saul Karath. Malak. The whole kriffing Star-Forge-that-we-still-didn't-know-what-it-did. The weight of all that was hanging in between us, and I was suddenly afraid that if I moved or even breathed he'd pull away. "Sorry," he'd say, "that was a huge mistake. Let's just get back to the task at hand and forget it ever happened," the same way everyone on that damn ship did when I tried to have a serious conversation for more than three minutes.

But he didn't. He just kept looking at me, brown-eyed gaze as serious as I'd ever seen it. Unsure of what to say, I gazed back, with my breath still caught in my throat. I was practically on the verge of running out of air when he moved at last—to pull me closer, until I inhaled the leathery smell of the orange jacket against my cheek and was forced to admit that the damn thing had its charms after all. I could feel Carth's heart pounding, and he wasn't the only one. I even forgot to wonder if Jolee had been right about my bantha breath.

"Well, I guess you win, gorgeous. That's definitely not the kind of attention I could get from a blaster rifle." He sounded a little flustered, a little surprised still, much the same way I was feeling.

"I hope not," I replied. Where was that impulse to dig my toe into the floor coming from? I was an adult—a more-than-usually-badass adult who'd just faced down two terentateks alone, who'd bested the leader of the Sith Academy and beaten the Dark Lord's apprentice in single combat, all of which by rights should be a lot harder than kissing someone, most handsome pilot in the galaxy or not. It wasn't even like it was the first time either of us had done this (even if had been, well—never mind how long). I couldn't think why I was walking on tiptoe here, except that the stakes were so high.

I wasn't sure which of us moved first. The next kiss was slower, deeper, and all the sweeter because this time it was so intentional. The next of many to come, I caught myself hoping as we parted.

"Took us long enough, didn't it?" I asked, aware that I was tipping my hand.

"Well, if I'd known you—" Carth cut himself off. "I was going to say this might've happened sooner, but maybe not. Little out of practice. And I just—I mean, there's just a lot going on." I felt his fingers splay against my back, over the material of my robes, referencing them without having to say anything. Belatedly I remembered I was wearing ridiculous high-necked Jedi underwear.

"Tonight? I can't think of a thing." I reached up and finally—_finally_—brushed those two stray commas of hair off his forehead. They fell right back down, but it didn't matter. The point of the act had always been just to touch him.

He leaned down and brushed his lips against my ear. I'd been hit with Force Lightnings that were less electrifying. "So," he said softly, "any other un-blaster-like talents you've been holding back?"

My hands began to wander away from his shoulders and down his body, purely of their own accord. I had nothing to do with it. Really. "Not to disparage your trusty blasters, flyboy, but I like to think I'm a little more versatile."

"Is that so, beautiful?" he asked, pulling back to look at me. He was grinning now, a genuine, open smile that nonetheless had as much heat to it as a fresh mug of caffa. "Prove it."

That smile seemed to brush aside all that weight between us like it was nothing. Laughing, I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him into the chair.


	12. Scalene

A/N: Ah, cockpit romance (actually, more often it's cockpit smut, but we're trying to stay reasonably in line with the game's rating here). It's a staple of FemRevan/Carth stories. But you can't have a romance on a ten-passenger ship without the person who can use the Force to read your mind knowing, which is where another staple of this pairing comes in: Bastila's confrontation. The traditional way to handle this is to make her an irrational harpy who doesn't want anyone to have any fun, but if you know your KotOR, her perspective might begin to seem a bit more reasonable very soon…

"Scalene," of course, is the geometric term for a triangle that has three unequal sides. Probably not very original, but since this story plays out like a kind of love triangle, I thought it was fitting. We're picking up some hours after the end of the last chapter.

I don't own KotOR or its characters.

----

"Scalene" (Bastila, Carth)  
Ebon Hawk, en route Korriban—Manaan

----

I knew as soon as I opened my eyes that kolto was not going to help with any of my problems. My limbs were painfully stiff after having been contorted to fit in and around the chair for most of the night. There was some chance I might die with that crick still in my neck. I was sore in a way I'd probably feel for a while, and I was just waking up from—if I was optimistic about my estimate—an hour and a half of sleep all night.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt this good.

"Morning, beautiful," Carth said.

"Hey there, handsome thug," I greeted him softly. Who would have two people could fit so neatly in the pilot's chair?

"Oh, for crying out—can I at least get 'flyboy'?"

"What's it worth to you?"

He kissed me, slow and lingering—an infinitely better start to the day than any I'd had in the last several weeks. "_Carth_," I breathed, which got a smile out of him. Unfortunately the mood didn't hold for long before my thoughts took a less romantic turn: "Urgh. I'm not looking forward to trying to explain this." Bastila's admonitions, Juhani's disapproval, Mission's teasing, Canderous' cracks…

"We've still got a little while before anyone else is likely to be up. If you want to try to make it back to the women's quarters, now's the time," Carth said.

If I was there in the morning, maybe I could convince them I'd just been up late. I was even pretty sure it had been my night to sleep on the floor (four women, three bunks, one rotation system), so I might get lucky sneaking in.

"I'd better." I tested my limbs, found that most of them were awake enough to let me stand, and got stiffly to my feet, banging my knee painfully on the console along the way. Carth rubbed his legs, which had probably lost circulation hours ago. I started searching the floor.

We got ready in companionable silence. I was just pulling my boots back on when he said, "I'll give it a few minutes before I head out myself."

"Does it bother you that we're sneaking out like this?"

"Well, I can't say I'm crazy about skulking around behind everyone's backs, but I guess I can see where you're coming from. I'm not particularly in the mood for an interrogation either." In light of the day's events, this would prove to be unfortunate. Right then, though, Carth was pausing with his jacket in hand and looking at me with a fresh uncertainty. "You—you don't regret it, do you?"

"Not for a second." I reached up to brush those two locks of hair from his forehead. Grinning, he kissed me, I kissed him back, and we almost ended up right back in the chair again. "Hey, hey—!" I laughed, extricating myself and picking up the empty caffa mugs. "I'm going. I'll see you in a bit."

I had to make a conscious effort to keep from humming as I headed down the hall toward the main hold. Life was good. The shadows of Korriban were behind us, we had a few days of transit between us and our next set of life-threatening objectives, and the Sith seemed like an abstract concept in comparison to the reality of Carth's warm body underneath mine in the chair. I was going to sleep in, eat a big breakfast, maybe practice sparring—

Running into Bastila wasn't part of the plan, but the one thing I should have known about that mission by then was that things _never_ went according to plan.

----

She was marching down the hallway, robes arranged precisely around her, lips set in a tight horizontal line. There was no way to get to the rest of the ship without squeezing past her in the narrow corridor.

"Morning, Bastila," I said with careful neutrality.

"Did you sleep well?" she asked without bothering to greet me.

I couldn't have lied convincingly even if we hadn't been bondmates; my hair was a wreck and I probably had bags under my eyes the size of concussion grenades. I went for a very Jedi-like half-truth. "Actually, no, I didn't. I couldn't get tired, so I just stayed up. You know how that is."

That was the wrong thing to say if there ever was one. "Yes, I know exactly how it is," Bastila cut in crisply. "Did you think I wouldn't notice that you're practically glowing?"

I opened my mouth with the intention of coming up with a really good comeback to this, but she grabbed me by the wrist and practically strong-armed me into the communications room before my wits caught up with my intentions.

"I know I haven't guided you as well as I would have wished, but this I _have _been warning you about ever since the first week of your training," she snapped, hands on hips. I'd never heard her sound more like her mother. "It's just..._maddening _to see that you've utterly disregarded all my advice!"

"Not _all _of it," I replied in my defense.

"The most important part!"

"Good morning, Bastila," Carth said from the doorway. He must have heard what was going on. His jacket was fully done up now and his hair somewhat more organized than mine, and I had to hand it to him for showing up to take his share of the lumps instead of sneaking past. Nice to know we really were in this together.

Bastila immediately rounded on him. "And you—you should know better than this, Carth Onasi. The fate of the galaxy is resting on this woman's shoulders! I'm sure I don't need to tell you how disastrous it would be if she were to fall to the dark side, especially as a result of something as avoidable as your selfish lack of self-control." Whoa, that made me stand up straighter. _My_ shoulders? I'd thought I was just Bastila's sidekick here.

Carth came forward into the room. "Bastila, I know you mean well, but you can't make all her decisions for her. As long as she stays on the right path, I don't see how anything else she does is any of your business."

"Of _course _it's my business. She and I share a bond; anything she does—"

"—will affect you as well, I know, you've told us that again and again. But you're not the only one who's affected. I want to help her stay on the light side just as much as you do. Hell, if anything, it's the Jedi Council and their lack of information that could be setting her up for failure, not me."

"You have no idea what you're talking about. She's—"

"Standing right here, so what if we stop talking about her in the third person," I interrupted flatly. "Carth's right; what happened last night was my decision. So if you want to blame anyone, it should be me."

Bastila stared both of us down. "Is that what you think this is about? A single event? Whatever happened last night—and I _don't_ want to know any more than I've already sensed, so please don't give me any details—isn't the point. The point is _attachment_. And under the circumstances, I believe I have a right to ask exactly what the nature of that attachment is."

I shot a swift glance at Carth—not only because of what Bastila was saying (just how much had she sensed?!), but because I genuinely didn't know the answer. How serious _was_ I? How serious was _he?_

Luckily he came to the rescue on that one before I could overanalyze it. "It doesn't matter," he said, sidestepping neatly. "No matter what our feelings are, I'd like to think we're both professional enough not to let them affect the mission."

"So do I," I jumped in with equal force.

"Don't you try to deflect the question—"

"Hey, is everything okay? I heard yelling." So much for not affecting the Mission. Her head appeared around the doorframe, quickly followed by the rest of her.

"We're fine, Mission. Bastila's just trying to throw her weight around," Carth told her–it has to be said—more than a little petulantly.

It was Taris all over again. Another minute of this and at least one of them was going to break out their claws, and then we'd have to banish them from Wookiee society. "Carth, why don't you and Mission go get yourselves some breakfast," I suggested, although it wasn't actually a suggestion. "This is something Bastila and I need to hash out ourselves."

"I'm not just gonna leave you to be berated for something that isn't—"

"Please, Carth. You report to your superiors and I have to report to mine."

I knew the military analogy would make sense to him. "I'm sorry," he said to me after a minute's hesitation—leaving me wondering if now _he_ wasn't regretting what had happened—and then he added to Mission, "Come on, I think I can probably coax some biscuits out of the synthesizer." Mission shot me an anxious glance (no question over whose side she'd take in the Great Jedi Love Life War) and I came back with an expression distantly related to a reassuring smile. Bastila had the good grace to wait until they were out of earshot before she started in on me again.

"Have you thought about the possible consequences? The man is obsessed with his revenge quest against Admiral Karath. What if he goes off the rails—"

"He won't," I shot back, as angry at the thought as if it hadn't already occurred to me more than once; "he promised he'd—"

"—or gets captured, even killed?" That shut me up. "Remember those datapad journals you found, Duron Qel-Droma and Shaela Nuur? It was love that drove Shaela to the dark side after Duron died, that turned her mind to rage and hatred. Those feelings were what caused her to fail in her mission and be killed by the terentateks—"

This struck me as a blatantly revisionist version of history. "No, Shaela and Duron both died because Guun Han couldn't put the greater good above one petty rule. If he'd accepted or even tolerated their love—if he hadn't abandoned them to go glory-seeking, Miss-Killing-Malak-is-My-Audition-for-Masterhood—the three of them would probably have been our masters."

Bastila scoffed. "Hardly. What would we have to learn from so-called Jedi who could not even abide by the central tenets of the order?"

"That Jedi aren't droids! That a lifetime of repression isn't the only way to follow the light! Look at Jolee; you said yourself that he's a servant of the light, and he's one of the strongest believers in love I've ever met." When the hell had I started using the word _love_? But it was too late to stop then. "He says that what Jedi need to learn to control is _passion_, and that love—"

"As much as I respect Jolee, he is not a Jedi, not any longer. He has neither the wisdom nor the perspective needed to make pronouncements about our doctrine. Even if he did, you cannot simply appeal to any authority you can find who will tell you what you want to hear. That's the way of the Sith."

"Well, maybe it's time we looked at our doctrine again."

"Do you know how many times this argument has been had throughout the history of the Jedi Order? It's only novel to you. Ask Master Dorak the next time we visit Dantooine, and he'll tell you how often it ends well."

"These arguments only happen because we train Jedi to be paranoid about relationships! We enforce this rigorous, unnatural self-denial and wonder why Jedi turn to the dark side to escape it."

"That you want something does not mean that you're entitled to it. And that you would prioritize some—some silly romance over the safety, no, the _survival_ of millions of people is absolutely appalling!"

"Now you're just—"

"Don't you _dare_ try to tell me I'm being melodramatic!" Once again she knew just how to stop me, because that had been exactly what I'd been going to say. Bastila's eyes were blazing. The mix of emotions I was getting from her—frustration, anger, self-righteousness, and something else I couldn't place—made me even more irritated as she continued her tirade. "What we are doing here, on this ship, is vital to the fate of the galaxy. We do _not_ have room for even the smallest of lapses, especially someone as utterly steeped in the dark side as _you_!"

She jumped, as if she'd even startled herself with that one and might like to take it back, but I wasn't about to let her. "What the hell are you talking about?" I demanded. "I've done almost everything right. I freed slaves on Kashyyyk, I redeemed Sith on Korriban, I paid people's debts on Taris out of my own shallow pockets. Every time someone on this ship has had a moral dilemma, I've steered them toward mercy and compassion. I don't know how I ended up calling so many of the shots on a mission where you're supposed to be the commander, but don't tell me I haven't been following the light!"

Bastila was stumbling over her words now. "I—I just meant that you've had so little training; you're so strong in the Force that you have to be even more cautious than the rest of us about succumbing to the dark side—"

"What are you, jealous?" I was just baiting her without thinking, but as soon as I said it I realized that was exactly what she was. That was the emotion spiking the edges of her thoughts. The advantage I could press.

"Don't be ridi—"

"Of me or of him, Bastila?"

"Stop this."

"No, enlighten me, _Padawan_. I can't tell if your problem is that you're angry that you've never had anyone to get attached _to_, or if it's that you don't want me to be dependent on anyone but you."

It was her turn to be stunned into silence. She stared at me, looking like I'd run a lightsaber through her ribs. When she spoke again, her voice started off dangerously low. "You don't know that there's never been anyone I might have cared for. You have no idea. But if there _has_ been, then rest assured that I have controlled my passions_. As a Jedi should!_"

She'd crescendoed into a shout. The faint cooking noises that had been coming from the direction of the synthesizer stopped. For the first time, I realized just how much darkness was surrounding us—both of us. Apparently neither Bastila nor I was as unshakeable in the light as we'd thought.

_Was_ this the way love inevitably turned out for a Jedi?

"I'm sorry," I said heavily.

Bastila sighed and studied one of the consoles for a long moment. "I understand that it's difficult—" she began, then stopped and shook her head. "No, that's a platitude. What I'm attempting to say is that—if I could just be your friend, I would want nothing more strongly for you than your happiness. If we were different, I suppose I might…help you choose your perfume, or—" She threw her hands up in frustration. "I don't even know what ordinary women _do_ in this sort of situation!"

"They support each other, Bastila," I said, and I couldn't keep the accusation out of my voice.

"I am _trying_." Her tone was almost pleading, and she was letting her shoulders slump in a way I'd never seen from her before. "Whether you believe me or not, I am trying. But we're not ordinary women. Please, you have to break off whatever attachment you have to Carth. For Jedi, there is so much more at stake than happiness." Her mouth twisted, momentarily slipping past her tight control into a bitterness-laced smile. "That gets easier, with time."

_It gets easier not to be happy._ The warmth I'd been basking in a few minutes earlier was still fresh in my mind. I knew it was an indulgence, from a Jedi's perspective; I could get by without it just the way I'd been doing before. But to give all that up—to give _Carth_ up right then, when we'd finally gotten past all the distrust and been _happy_, genuinely, even with the war raging around us—

"Look, I can't think about this right now," I told Bastila. "I've barely slept. Just give me a few hours to rest, and I—I'll try to talk to you as a Jedi."

She didn't say anything to that, just stepped aside from the doorway to let me by.

----

We never did have that second conversation. I was woken from a fitful sleep later that morning by the sudden jarring of the ship as the Leviathan caught us in its tractor beam. And when, a few hours later, Saul Karath's torturer held his finger over the button that would plunge Carth into agony unless I started talking, Bastila at least had the good grace not to say, "I told you so."


	13. Loyalty

A/N: Fair warning that this chapter is the Leviathan torture scene. It's not graphic, but if you find the subject material triggering or unendurably unpleasant, please hang in there until next week.

I chose this scene as a kind of character study for Revan. Since we're not going through the events ourselves, it's easy to imagine Revan as unambiguously heroic in this scene—distressed by what's happening to Carth (or Bastila), yes, but rarely in any real danger of telling the Sith anything. Our Revan _isn't_ always heroic, though, and she has the added complication of coming right off of the previous two stories' events. As with most of the game's truly morally ambiguous decisions, what choice she makes is for you to decide for yourself, but I thought the process might be worth taking a look at.

As always, I don't own KotOR or its characters.

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"Loyalty" (Carth, Bastila)  
Leviathan

----

"Activate the torture fields."

I was looking at Bastila when he said it. She closed her eyes a split second before the button mashed down. She was trying to meditate, but there was no time before we were plunged into—I don't have a metaphor for it. I don't even have words. The pain.

I don't think I could have been conscious of it all at the time, but when I look back my memories of what wasn't pain are surprisingly vivid: Carth's screams, Bastila's uncharacteristic animal grunts and howls. I couldn't tell you what sounds I made. I retched, but nothing came out—how long had it been since I'd eaten? The medical bay? Before the Sith academy trial? I think I grabbed my head, but if so that would have been instinct; it was impossible to determine where the pain was coming from. It was everywhere and all-encompassing.

And it went on.

----

We'd made such a good show of it. We'd met them at the ramp of the Ebon Hawk, all ten of us, and we'd given them hell. Zaalbar had been a hero, wielding Bacca's blade like a figure out of legend; Juhani had whirled and slashed with abandon; Canderous had laughed with the thrill of it as he pumped the first line of guards full of blaster bolts. Even T3 got in some shots. We'd mowed down the first troops they had waiting for us and gotten well into the second before the Sith had finally managed to drag Jolee off and things started going downhill. They really couldn't have had a clue how many of us there were—suddenly that three-at-a-time rule was paying off.

Even at the time we knew there wasn't much point in fighting—Carth had already told us we'd need to get to the Leviathan's bridge to open the hangar bay doors, so unless we could kill every Sith on the ship, we were inevitably going down. But damn it, we were going down swinging. In the end it probably only made the Sith want to hurt us more.

Carth, Bastila and I had been pulled off together, as we'd predicted. The Sith had had to conk me on the head to get my lightsabers away, and they'd made the stupid mistake of not sedating us on sight—probably because taunting us was the highlight of the grunts' year. Bastila had been so incensed at the guard stripping her that she'd forgotten she had Force powers and slapped him across the face. I'd Force Pushed him into the wall with a sickening round of cracks and then we were at it again, Bastila and I back to back, smiting Sith with the full fury of the Force while Carth, robbed of even his boots, just slugged anyone he could reach. But we couldn't keep it up forever, and when we ran out of energy the Sith wrenched us apart and dragged us to the torture fields. We left behind a pile of bodies for the cleanup crews, though. Nothing Jedi-like about the bitter smirks of satisfaction we'd exchanged over that.

Oh, yes, we were brave about it. Even once they'd shoved us in I could still joke. "I was hoping the next time I saw your underwear would be under better circumstances than this," I'd quipped wryly to Carth. He'd come up with a grim smile, Bastila had looked as scandalized as I'd expected, and the three of us had stood together and defiant as Saul Karath strode into his torture chamber.

It was so easy to be confident before the pain.

----

It ended. The flickering yellow and white waves of the torture field were the first thing I was consciously aware of. We looked up slowly, mentally evaluating first our own battered bodies and then each other's. I was alive. I couldn't feel any actual indications of broken bones or ruptured organs; it had only felt like it. Bastila was gulping air in high, sharp gasps, trying again to calm her mind and prepare for the next onslaught. It could even have been an attempt at Battle Meditation, although I wasn't sure even Bastila could do it—not like this. Carth's eyes searched mine out, painfully. He looked absolutely ragged. How much worst must this be for someone whose torturer used to be his hero? His _friend_?

The corners of his mouth turned up in a grimace that I recognized as a smile only because trying to reassure me was so much like him.

"—will appreciate any information I can give him when he arrives" was where I started processing words again. Saul—we were on a first-name basis, thanks to Carth's stories—seemed to be talking to the Sith at the controls, but from the way he kept looking at us, the speech was obviously for our benefit.

"Don't waste your breath, Saul! We won't answer any of your questions!" Carth burst out defiantly. His voice was raw, but he still had fight left in him. Good thing at least one of us did.

"I'm sure you won't. However, we both know your friend's loyalties have proven in the past to be somewhat…flexible."

I was exhausted and in pain and not in the mood for his mind games. "What are you talking about?" I demanded—stupidly, since his torturer still had his finger over the button.

"I am interrogating you, not the other way around. You will answer questions, not ask them," Saul snapped, petulant like a child, and I felt a faint flicker of something like amusement. "It is time to put your loyalty to the test. I doubt torturing you will gain me your true cooperation. Your will is too strong to be broken that way." I was glad he was so clear on that point, because I sure as hell wasn't, not with my skull still throbbing like it was trying to split open. "However, even the strongest of heroes has trouble watching those they care about suffering. The interrogation will begin now. Each time you refuse to answer or give me a false answer, Carth will suffer."

I snapped my head to the side—and Force, was that ever a mistake; the pain was immense—just in time to see Carth swallow hard. Bastila reacted with a mental wave of concern, and I knew she was thinking the same thing I was: he was already in very bad shape.

There is never a good answer in situations like these, but there _is_ a Jedi answer. And the Jedi would say, calmly and dispassionately, Carth Onasi is a very good soldier, but he knew the risks and he is not as important as the mission. He is not as important as the sum of all the people who could die if that mission fails. He isn't as important as Bastila, or even as you, they would say—as me.

But he was.

"Don't hurt him. I beg you!" I didn't even recognize that desperate half-whisper as my own voice until it was out. Beside me, Bastila stiffened. She'd been right about everything.

"My pain is meaningless!" Carth shouted. "Tell him nothing!" He sounded so forceful. I'd seen him take down scores of enemies, but he'd never looked as strong to me as he did then, helpless and half-naked in a torture field and ready to suffer horrors for the cause. I think only Saul and I heard the razor edge of fear in his voice.

But if anything, it only spurred Saul on. He turned to me, smug in his freshly-pressed uniform and his ugly Sith hat and his cruelty. "I tire of these games—now I want answers! On what planet is the Jedi Academy at which you were trained?"

On what planet…? Malak used to be a Jedi, I thought dimly. He was surrounded by former Jedi. Among them, they had to know every Jedi academy and enclave in the galaxy. It couldn't be that they didn't know about Dantooine's. Did it matter which one _I_ was trained at…?

But I didn't have the time—right then, I didn't even have the acuity—to figure out his angle. I had to say something fast and I couldn't give him anything. I was a Jedi. "Jedi Academy?" I repeated, although my voice cracked on the feigned confusion. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Very well. This is the price of your resistance."

Carth's field lit up and he screamed—not coherent words, just a full-throated scream of agony. War hero or not, everyone sounds the same past the breaking point.

Another thing I couldn't remember how I knew.

"Enough!" Saul snapped, and the field cut off. "You see what happens when you try to defy me?" I saw what happened all right; just standing upright looked like the hardest battle Carth had ever fought. He wasn't meeting my gaze now. He was just trying to breathe.

"This first question was a test. Obviously Malak knew the Academy was on Dantooine, and it has since been destroyed by our fleet! Dantooine is an empty graveyard now. Nothing remains but a smoking ruin and the charred remains of your former Masters!"

_HATE HIM_, my brain seethed. _HATE HIM HATE HIM HATE HIM HATE HIM_ because as soon as he said it, I knew it was true. While we'd been squabbling over Jedi doctrine, Malak had been killing Jedi.

"You will pay for this crime, Saul!" I exploded, not giving a damn that that was exactly what he wanted. "You and all the Sith!"

I sensed the Jedi Code over top of the grief in Bastila's mind before I saw her lips start moving. Saul shot her a look of pure malice, but she didn't stop.

"More empty threats. We Sith prefer to let our actions speak for us. Perhaps that is why we are winning this war." _HATE HIM HATE HIM HATE HIM. _"Now…tell me your mission. How were the Jedi planning on using you to stop Lord Malak and our Sith armada?"

_The Star Forge_. The answer was right there. It would be so easy to say it. The chance that he would stop torturing Carth or any of us if I did was small, but there was a chance. At least I would have tried to do _something_—

I shot another desperate glance toward his field. When I tried to get a sense of him, I found that at that moment there were two thoughts in his mind, pain and not-pain, and all other concerns were an incredibly distant third. I wanted to say—I wanted to _think_—please, stop this, please, Saul, if I'm the one whose answers you want, then hurt me. But I knew he wouldn't do it, and there was some reptilian part of my hindbrain sobbing with relief that it wasn't me.

Bastila's mind, too, was so clear that I could feel a lot more than her emotions—specific thoughts were coming up. _Taris, Dantooine_, she seemed to be repeating over and over again in her head, and I would have thought she'd gone mad if I hadn't known she was trying to get her message to me. We'd never been more closely connected.

"I won't betray the Jedi," I said, but it didn't sound heroic at all.

"Perhaps you need a reminder of the consequences of refusing to cooperate."

Carth doubled over, clawing at his head. This time I could make out words, repeated again and again: "the pain." If the torture fields had left any openings for Force powers, Saul Karath would have been a dead man. There was nothing Jedi-like about my thoughts as we stood there, powerless to help Carth or even stop our ears—a violent well of rage and hatred that would have made the Sith students on Korriban look like recalcitrant children. Yes, Bastila had been right, and she wasn't getting any satisfaction out of it.

"Listen, can you not hear him suffering? You can spare him further pain by simply answering my questions." Suddenly, in my overloaded, sleep-deprived mind, this sounded so reasonable. Saul was trying to help me here; _I_ was the one who was really hurting Carth.

No, that was the Sith, I had to remind myself. The Sith who were going to destroy the galaxy if we didn't stop them. And maybe destroy Carth even if we did.

"Now, I will ask again—on what mission did the Jedi Council send you?"

Mission, I thought, fighting nausea, pain, anguish, she was—on what mission. How had all this happened? The day had started off so beautifully. If we'd known, the three of us wouldn't have argued, we would have—

Saul cleared his throat impatiently.

Bastila was looking at me, her expression openly pleading: _please, _don't_ tell him anything_. Carth was looking at me too, and the plea he was struggling to hide behind his clenched jaw was even more fervent than Bastila's:_ tell him everything_, part of him was begging me, no matter how loyally he wanted to resist. Saul Karath was waiting for an answer. The torturer had his finger poised over the button.

I opened my mouth.


	14. No Emotion

A/N: Two themes in this one: our narrator's reaction to The Big Reveal, and Juhani's romance plot. The game does have a (possibly cut? I can't remember) scene for the latter later on, but the two strands fit so well together that I wanted to do a different take.

I don't own KotOR or its characters.

* * *

"No Emotion" (Juhani)  
Ebon Hawk, en route Leviathan—Manaan

* * *

What do you do with a revelation like that? Maybe it would have been fitting if I'd gone on a sobbing jag or a drinking binge, locked myself in my quarters, stared at the walls and refused to eat, punished myself with combat training until I collapsed, or tried to kill myself. Or all of the above.

I didn't. Partially because our mission didn't leave a lot of room for that kind of indulgence, partially because I've never been all that big on self-pity. I wanted to make a go of keeping things normal, to show everyone that I was fine. I was Revan but I was just the same as ever.

So I meditated. I got into stupid arguments with Jolee, who had always known and so treated me the same as ever ("Wait, so _I_ was the bantha?" I demanded—he just smirked). I probably played more rounds of Pazaak on that trip than I ever had in my life; Mission and Zaalbar and I bet spare blasters and they bled me dry, just like always. I even cleaned the synthesizer the next morning, in accordance with Bastila's chore rotation system. The former Dark Lord of the Sith, mucking out the synth with an old rag. Nobody in the galaxy would have believed it.

I was Revan. Except I wasn't, because I was smart enough to get that Mission's acceptance of me, and Jolee's, and the acceptance of anyone else who adhered to the light side, was contingent on my _not_ being Revan. Not remembering her, not feeling like her, and definitely not acting like her, at least not the way she'd been at the end. Carth's acceptance…I didn't think I could ask for that.

When Juhani came into the women's quarters the day after, I was meditating—on my knees, like Bastila, which I guess was penance in a way. I sensed her standing in the doorway watching me, and when she didn't leave I let myself come out of it and twisted to face her.

"How do you feel, Re—Padawan?" she asked.

"The million-credit question." I got up and sat on my bunk, against the protests of my stiff legs. The beads in her hair clicked softly as she turned her head to follow me. "I feel…angry, if I'm honest. Frustrated. Deeply troubled. Disgusted, more than anything."

"Are you truly so upset at being Revan?"

"No, I just cleaned the synthesizer, and the gunk was so thick I almost had to cut it out with a lightsaber. Does anyone even look at that damn chart except me?"

She ignored this sincere outburst of anguish and wit and kept pressing. "And how do you feel about your identity?"

"Don't try to change the subject," I told her.

Juhani smiled. "I am only following your example."

She sat down on the edge of the bunk, tentatively. I scooted toward the pillow to make room for her and tried to find a comfortable position between the wall and the ridiculously low support beams overhead. Whoever designed those damn bunks must have been planning to run a shuttle service for Jawas.

"There is something I have been wanting to tell you," Juhani said. "Something of an—origin story, I suppose. The Jedi on Taris shared it with us children; I must have heard it half a dozen times. It was my favorite, for reasons I'm sure you will understand."

I motioned for her to continue.

"I have spoken of the massacre of the Cathar by the Mandalorians. Because so few of my people survived, at first little was known to the rest of the galaxy about what had happened. Years later, when the Mandalorians attacked the Republic, you and your followers came to Cathar to learn the truth."

"Revan's followers," I said, very deliberately, drawing the line.

"Yes. The Council sent a group of Jedi to stop her. Master Vrook was their leader." Juhani smiled a little sheepishly. "I confess I never really forgave him for that, although it was not his fault. In any case, you were surrounded by these Jedi, who were to order your followers to disband."

She'd slipped right back into "you" again. I let it go. You don't get to be Dark Lord of the Sith without learning how to pick your battles.

"But then you found something on the ground, an object that led all the Jedi there to have a vision of the battle. Such as it was. It showed everyone the true nature of the atrocities the Mandalorians committed on my people's home world, and was what led many Jedi to join your cause."

"What was it?" I asked. It was so surreal to hear my own life story for the first time.

"It was the mask of a Mandalorian," she answered. "A Mandalorian who was killed by her comrades even as she attempted to stop the slaughter of my people. The Jedi told us you swore to wear it until the Mandalorians were defeated. Yet they said you wore a cloak even before that, believing your message to be more important than your identity."

Yes, I thought, of course. There was something to be said for being anonymous, like a walking embodiment of the cause. The robes I'd seen in the visions wiped out any real sense of identity completely, just like the legends. Canderous hadn't even known Revan was a woman. In fact, now that I thought back I could hear how careful Bastila had been never to give me any pronouns, just "Revan" this or "the Dark Lord" that. Cautious to a fault until the last.

The fact that almost no one had known my face probably helped with not getting busted by the Jedi, too.

"Do you remember that?" Juhani asked.

I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes, trying to dig that or anything else out of the recesses of my mind. "No," I finally had to admit.

When I opened my eyes again, she was looking at me. Her yellow gaze was intense. "And—and Taris? When you freed me from the slavers of the Exchange? Do you remember?"

"No," I repeated. We both knew she'd known the answer before I said it. Why had she wanted to hear it? "All I have is the Star Maps and facing Bastila's strike team, when Malak attacked the ship. But I don't—I'm not even Revan in some of those memories; I can _see_ Revan. I'm outside myself. Or maybe I'm—because they're Bastila's visions too?"

Of course Juhani had even less of an idea than I did; I just needed someone to work those visions out _to_. Bastila and I had gone in circles dissecting them, over and over until her patience finally wore thin and she'd told me the Force worked in mysterious ways and that was that. I remembered those conversations in a new light now that I knew she'd been lying to me.

Juhani almost hid her disappointment. "Well, it does not matter. Perhaps you will remember more, in time."

Holy kriffing hell, _what?_ "Why do you want me to remember?" I asked. "Isn't that exactly what every Jedi in the galaxy _shouldn't_ want? Not to mention every other sane being out there?"

"Because they have forgotten! They did not know you as I did. The fools—"

She checked the snarl.

"There was so much good in you, so much light. I told you the Jedi who followed you spoke of you constantly. And I have no doubt you have heard the stories—the legends, really. Of Revan's tactical genius, her charisma, her—her passion for justice. With your memories, you could truly come into your own again."

Ah, yes, Revan the Hero. I felt a sharp swell of bitterness, which Bastila would have sensed instantly but which went right over Juhani's head. The only thing harder than freeing myself from the sins of my past could be spending the rest of my life—which might be pretty short, under the circumstances—trying to live up to _myself_.

"I also built the most obnoxious assassin droid in the galaxy," I reminded her dryly. "Let's not leave anything out."

"Well." Juhani gave me a small smile. "No one is perfect."

I laid my hands flat on my thighs—another mannerism of Bastila's—and contemplated how the hell to say this. "Listen. I know Revan has been an inspiration to you, but trust me, you're in the minority. I'll accept the responsibility for being Revan—for all the things I've done, light and dark—and for whatever that makes anyone think about me. But I don't know if I want to be Revan going forward. I don't know if I could even if I wanted to."

"Are you ashamed?"

"Are you kidding? Juhani—" I leaned forward, keeping eye contact with her to make sure she was listening. "I betrayed the Jedi Order. I started a civil war. I brought the Republic to its knees. I can't even guess how many deaths I've been responsible for. If the day ever comes again when I'm not ashamed, you should be very, very afraid of me, because it doesn't get any darker than that."

She sat still for a few seconds, and then she deliberately pulled back several inches and folded her hands in her lap, putting some distance between us. Studying the far wall with more intensity than it deserved, she said, "I am—I am proud of myself. A healthy pride, I believe. I still have so much to learn—and yet, I am able to stand tall, as a Jedi." Juhani turned her gaze back to me. "And I have you to thank for this. It was you who rescued me from slavery, you who turned me away from the dark side, you who helped me to stay strong even against striking my worst enemy in anger. It was you who taught me that everyone can be redeemed. As long as you walk forward on the path of the light, there will never be shame in being Revan."

"And if I fall? You think the Jedi would recapture me and see if the third time's the charm?" She was frustrating me, the way she'd sugarcoated Revan in her mind. I wanted to keep bringing her back to the truth, what the rest of the galaxy remembered about Revan: Revan _fell_. For the first time, I _wanted_ to be the bad guy, because at least being on the same page as Carth and everyone like him about that would mean I'd know how to move forward.

She wasn't going to let me. "You will not! I said to you when we first spoke of this that I could see you have truly changed. Neither of us will fall again."

I opened my mouth to say something Jedi-like about overconfidence, but Juhani anticipated it and held up a hand to stop me. "I…I wish to help you be strong, to give you cause to remain on the right path. I want to stand at your side in the light."

The blush that spread across her pale cheeks didn't leave a lot of room for misinterpretation.  
I probably should have seen that coming, but I didn't. My only defense is that we Jedi are predisposed to be preternaturally dense in the ways of love. We ex-Sith are even worse.

"What about Belaya?" I asked. No one had ever been explicit about it, but the connection been impossible to miss, those early days on Dantooine. Both of them kept their passions just under the surface, just waiting to rise and spill. Bastila would have called it a lack of self-control, but in the end I'd come to realize she wasn't much different. Neither was I.

I had thought the question might be a gentle way of deflecting Juhani, but instead she gave me a look of such anguish that the feeling crashed down over my mind like a storm. "What am I to say?" she burst out. "I have no more news of Dantooine than you, and the Force shows me nothing. I—I hope she is safe, but it may be that…" She swallowed thickly. "But knowing the answer could not change my feelings toward you. I can keep silent no longer."

Tears were pooling in the corners of her eyes, and she didn't blink them back. What an idiot I'd been. Even my anti-self-pity campaign had been so focused on what _I_ was feeling—on being Revan, losing Bastila, losing Carth, losing Dantooine, and my stupid Sith-like pride in not showing weakness. The crew had jumped so quickly to support me that I'd convinced myself I was the only one who might have anything to feel sorry for. But Juhani had studied at the academy a hell of a lot longer than I had. Not just studied—_lived_. She was grieving for her home, for people she'd known for years, maybe for almost everyone who'd ever been kind to her. Now that I bothered to try to get a sense of her mind, the hints I caught were of survivor's guilt, anger, grief, love tinged with hopelessness. Right then, I probably had more in common with her than with anyone else in the galaxy.

So I should have known the right thing to say. As usual, I thought of the best lines hours later. I could have told her that even though I couldn't return her feelings, our friendship would still help keep us strong. I could have said I realized she was suffering and asked if she wanted to talk about it. There were so many damn things I could have said.

But at the time all I could think of was Carth, and all I could come up with was the Jedi response.

"Juhani," I said, like a hypocrite, "there is no emotion."

She took a shuddering little breath and turned away.

"There is peace. Yes. Yes, you are right. I am sorry I…allowed my foolishness to get the better of me. I will leave you to meditate in peace."

There was no anger in her voice, just naked pain. I wanted to reach out to her, to say something—anything—but nothing came. And so she slipped quietly out of the room, shutting the door behind her, leaving me alone.

Revan did try to meditate after that, but I can't say it brought her peace.


	15. Rites of Passage

A/N: So sorry for being late! I've been sick/out of town/trying to get this one in decent shape. Because I'm not working as far ahead of myself by this point as I was in the beginning, updates might be a bit slower from here, but I promise I won't forget about you, readers.

Note that since our setting is a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I'm treating the drinking age as something that's culturally, rather than legally, determined. Let the record show that I'm not encouraging underage drinking among any fourteen-year-old readers here on Earth (although for that matter, I'm not encouraging anyone to sneak into military bases and attack people with vibroblades either).

I don't own KotOR or its characters. I also don't own "no one likes us, no one likes us, etc.," because I kid you not, it is a canonical Mandalorian drinking chant. Those wacky Mandalorians.

* * *

"Rites of Passage" (Mission, Canderous, Zaalbar)  
Manaan

* * *

I had been captured and tortured, shot at, stabbed, and nearly assassinated by my own apprentice, but I think Manaan was the first time I was actually arrested. Or at least the first time I could remember. It was kind of novel, once I managed to get myself off the hook and was walking back into the Ahto City cantina, but I wasn't in much of a mood to appreciate that. I was tired, disgruntled, and aromatic in some truly unfortunate ways. The holding cell had smelled like fish.

The only good thing about the experience had been that Jolee's friend Sunry had been in the cell across from mine, and the Selkath had agreed to let me come back to discuss his case the next day—since I already had practice defending a seemingly hopeless client. In retrospect, even that would turn out to be a very mixed blessing.

Mission, Zaalbar and Canderous were sitting at one of the long booths in the back when I arrived at the cantina. The other patrons were giving them a wide berth, though whether that was because of Canderous' attitude or Big Z's smell I wasn't sure. It put the fish in perspective.

Mission jumped up as soon as she saw me. She'd ditched her armor and cleaned herself up in the hours since we'd left of the Sith base, for which I was glad. "Hey, there you are! We came as soon as we got your call." I couldn't tell if her voice actually sounded strained or if I was projecting.

"The Twi'lek told us you were arrested," Canderous said, not even trying to hide his amusement at that fact.

I slid into the booth and caught the Selkath bartender's eye. Luckily it was a slow night. "Yeah, I noticed none of you bothered to show up for my trial. Thanks for the support."

"Ha ha. You know the same as I do those fish-faced creeps were holding us back at the Ebon Hawk." Yes, that was definitely a new edge to her tone. "We're just lucky they let us go when they did. Everyone was pretty tense. For a while there I thought Juhani was gonna carve one of those Selkath up and serve them for dinner!"

Visions of kolto restrictions being slammed down on the Republic even as we spoke flashed through my mind. "Please tell me you didn't start any incidents while I was convincing the authorities we were there for diplomatic negotiations."

"No, I managed to talk her down. Really she just needed to blow off some steam, so I got HK to run her a couple of fighter simulations. Then Big Z and I started playing Pazaak and everyone else just got into it." Mission picked up a little more speed as she got into her story. "Jolee won. You wouldn't know it to look at him, but he's actually pretty sharp for an old guy."

"Oh?" I asked, trying to draw her out.

"Well, aside from that weird story he told us about some guy he used to know when he was a smuggler who cheated at cards and then got eaten by a sand panther." Her brow furrowed. "I didn't get the point, personally."

"Is everyone else still back at the ship?"

"Uh-huh. Jolee's having another fight with the synthesizer, and Juhani said she was gonna meditate for a while." Juhani had been meditating a lot since we'd last talked. Mission didn't mention Carth, and I didn't ask. Obviously we were still doing the giving-him-time thing. Still, it would have been nice if he'd turned up to see my triumphant reemergence as a free woman.

The light from the courtyard was spilling in through the open entrance to the cantina. I could hear the calm, constant splashing of the long fountains and the low roar of the waves just past the nearby wall. If I leaned out I could see the clean pale pavement, shading into purple now as the sun began to sink beneath the horizon and the artificial lights in the courtyards brightened. That feeling I'd had on Taris came back to me, of how much I'd enjoy this city under other circumstances.

The bartender came around the open side of the table and I ordered a Fogblaster, nice and simple. Bastila would have said that meditation, not a drink, was the way to unwind after a trying day, but Bastila wasn't there. It was only at odd moments that I could still get flashes of her mind through the shadow of the dark side that was keeping us separated. Each glimpse was the same—agony exploding inside a shell of serenity—but they got worse every time, sometimes with stabs of empathic pain that made Saul's torture fields seem like a backrub. She was reaching the breaking point. In the short run, there was nothing I could do about it but justify some booze to myself.

"Hey, barkeep," Canderous said with a toothy grin, "the lady in the ugly robe is Revan, and she just emptied a whole baseful of Sith. So you'll want to move quickly on that drink."

It was a real effort to master the urge to hit him upside the head with a lightsaber hilt. "Keep it down!" I hissed instead as the bartender left. "The city's crawling with Sith and Republic soldiers. I know you wouldn't mind having the bar fight of the century on your hands, but I'd like to enjoy my drink in peace."

"These cowards need something to shake them out of their enforced pacifism. Unfortunately it doesn't look like that droop-jowled bartender believed me."

"If you really want to boost our popularity, you should sing a few bars of that Mandalorian drinking song. You know, 'No one likes us, no one likes us, no one likes us'–sounds like Can't-derous' theme song, doesn't it, Mission?"

That joke was so stale that if it were bread you'd break your teeth on it, but the half-grin it got out of her anyway was worth it. Canderous, in contrast, looked like he wanted to defend his honor with a hearty pummeling all around. I gave him a pleasant smile and adjusted my lightsaber, which was poking into the back of the booth and making the Selkath around us really nervous. But it was just show on both our parts, and as soon as the drinks came back he uncurled his lip and asked, "Tell me about the battle. How much of a fight did the Sith put up?"

He was bored, it occurred to me; he hadn't done any fighting since the Leviathan. Better find something to keep him busy soon. I was going to give him a glossed-over version that would make it sound like he hadn't missed much, but Mission got there first.

"I took down a Dark Jedi," she answered.

The Mandalorian raised one scarred eyebrow at me. "That true?"

"It is." I'd just meant for her to hold the Dark Jedi off for ten or fifteen seconds until Zaalbar and I could finish our targets. When I'd turned around and realized she'd killed him I'd thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I never would have let her talk me into letting her come with me if I'd known the base would be crawling with fallen Jedi. Of if I could have predicted we'd be just in time to catch the last gasping breaths of tortured Selkath youths.

Even before then I'd been wondering if it hadn't been poor judgment to bring her. It had been a good tactical choice to have someone who could sneak around, open doors, take care of mines. Revan wouldn't even have hesitated. Sure, she and Zaalbar hadn't exactly had an easy life on Taris, and sure, she'd killed Gamorreans and rakghouls in the Undercity. But when she'd asked to come, I'd told her this would be different, and she'd told me she was ready.

Now that it was over, I wasn't sure.

Mission started to tell Canderous the story. Her voice was matter-of-fact—level without veering into smugness or unease. At the time I'd only noticed in passing when she'd switched from the blaster pistol to the vibroblade, and as she kept talking I realized why. She was describing blocks, parries, rapid flurries of strikes. In the heat of battle, I'd just been tracking on her enough to make sure she wasn't in trouble. That I'd paid so little attention to her duel until it was over was a testament to just how competent Mission's fighting was.

When had that happened?

"And then he just—he just fell," she finished. She began to trace a design on the tabletop with a drop of water from the outside of Zaalbar's glass. "Not really forwards or backwards at first, he just went down on his knees and collapsed right against my legs."

None of us said anything. Mission picked up another droplet on her fingertip and retraced the pattern, and Zaalbar quietly set one big hand on her shoulder. After another long drink, Canderous asked, "Was it your first kill?"

"No. And that guy wasn't even the first human; I mean, I was shooting at a bunch of people in there. But that was the first time I—you know. He was right _there_, looking at me."

"Why did you use a vibroblade? It's a much nastier weapon than a blaster or a lightsaber. More personal." Canderous was right, of course. Plasma weapons are almost entirely bloodless, whereas vibroblades—well, you'd better hope your armor is easy to clean. He wasn't mocking her, though; the tone of the question was entirely serious.

"Huh? Obviously you can't use a blaster against a Dark Jedi; you've gotta have something with cortosis weave in it if you want to stand a chance. Besides, I've been practicing a ton with a vibroblade lately. Probably all that watching these guys." Mission made a vague gesture in my direction, which I took to incorporate the rest of our little Jedi contingent too.

"Listen to that. It's elementary, but you've got to start somewhere. The girl will be like you in no time, Revan," Canderous said to me, then turned back to Mission before I could decide if that would be a good thing or an utterly terrifying one. "The first time you do something like that isn't easy, even for those who've been preparing for it all their lives. It gets better." For a Mandalorian, this was quasi-fatherly advice, but that one I was sure was a bad thing. Oblivious, Canderous picked up his mug again, found that it was empty, and banged it down on the table. "Time for another round," he pronounced.

The bartender was back almost before he finished the sentence—maybe I looked a little too Revan-like for comfort after all. "Ne'tra gal," I said. The distraction was a relief.

"Same here," Canderous said, evidently approving of my choice of the Mandalorian black ale. Ne'tra gal had vaguely positive associations in my mind, but when I tried to remember when I'd had it before, I came up dry. From my Revan days? The drink of the conquering hero?

Zaalbar, who was still nursing something huge and painful-looking, gestured to the bartender that he was fine. "Same thing for me too, please," Mission added as the Selkath turned to go.

"Oh, no, you don't," I told her, Bastila-esque. "Give it a few years before you start drowning your sorrows, Mission."

"Oh, come on, how many times do I have to tell you I ain't a kid?" Mission burst out crankily, more because that was the expected response than because she thought she'd get away with it.

I think Canderous surprised us both when he jumped in. "I agree. Anyone who can kill a Dark Jedi in single combat with a vibroblade is worthy of being called an adult."

I turned to stare at him. Granted, I didn't expect him to be a beacon of responsible role modeling, especially after that friendly guidance about how much easier it gets to kill people, but he could at least back me up. "Pretty arbitrary standard, don't you think?" I asked.

"A Mandalorian becomes an adult at thirteen, after undergoing a coming-of-age trial that makes him a warrior. I'd say this qualifies."

"Don't ask Big Z," Mission cut in quickly. "Wookiees live for like 600 years!"

"But our children also come of age around twelve years old," Zaalbar said. We caught each other's eyes. If anyone understood what kind of state Mission was in after the Sith base, it was him.

So much for backup from the reasonable adults. I considered arguing something about Mandalorian years vs. standard years and then thought twice about it. Even though I'd been confident I could protect her, if she was old enough to accompany me into life-threatening peril, she was old enough for a kriffing drink. "Make that three," I told the bartender, who hopped to.

Zaalbar wisely shifted the topic to something that had happened earlier with the Selkath on the ship, and Mission and Canderous got absorbed in the conversation, leaving me free to lean back in my seat and think. I was realizing I'd grown to like the feeling of being responsible for someone—not just in the general benevolent Jedi sense, but of Mission looking to me for support and guidance. And when I thought about it, I knew I must be feeling in a small way what Carth felt about Dustil; not wanting the kid to grow up, wishing they'd stay safe and with people who cared about them, hoping they'd be able to do something with their lives other than get embroiled in all the violence we'd been facing. The violence Canderous thought we'd always face, and if I was honest, I thought he was right. I wondered if my leading her into that violence that day had pushed her too hard toward adulthood. I wondered if I'd screwed up just by trying to be her guardian at all—what if I really did manage to turn her into some kind of Revan-like killing machine?

Mission Vao the grown-up. Listening to her talk, with the animation coming back into her face and voice, I decided the maturity (and the height) I was seeing now had been a long time coming. Mission had started off competent and self-possessed, and she'd been growing up the whole time I'd known her. All I could do was watch the process happen—and try not to screw it up.

The bartender came back and set the ales in front of us around the time the conversation wound down. In unison, as if we were performing a ritual as old as crafting one's first lightsaber, the three of us drank. I felt the ale spill down my throat and thought about how fleeting youth is, and how I wished I could actually remember mine.

Mission spluttered. "Blecch, this is _awful_! What do your people make it with, Canderous, Hutt slime? I feel like I just scrubbed my tongue with a Gamorrean's toothbrush." She spat the mouthful neatly back into the glass, ignoring Canderous' horrified expression. "Hey, you think if you drink fast we'd have time to make it to the zoo before it closes? I wanna see how the gizka are doing."

I have to admit I found myself grinning. Luckily, some things still had yet to change.


	16. Definition

A/N: This one's a Jolee + Carth story, set a few hours after the conclusion of Sunry's trial. These two have a lot in common, so I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write about them, and here's the result. The outcome of the trial is another thing I've intentionally left for you to decide for yourself.

I'd like to express my thanks again to all you readers, especially those dedicated souls who take time every week to give me their kind feedback on the latest chapter. I don't always reply to every review, but I read and appreciate them all more than I can tell you. We've still got a ways to go, so I hope you'll all continue to enjoy!

I don't own KotOR or its characters.

* * *

"Definition" (Jolee, Carth)  
Manaan

* * *

The trial was over.

The shadows on the pavement were long and the sea breeze was getting chilly by the time I finally made it back to the docks—not because I'd had anything to wrap up at the court, but because I'd taken the scenic route through Ahto City at a slow pace, dodging Sith on the way. I wasn't in a hurry to get home.

"Jedi are renowned for their fairness and pursuit of justice," Bastila had said on Dantooine, back when Dantooine still had Jedi and people for them to be renowned to. With a legacy like that behind me, you'd think I could feel like I'd been in the right, but I didn't. What I felt was weariness. And there was still one more heavy task between me and the Ahto City cantina: finding Carth.

We hadn't talked. I don't mean he was giving me the silent treatment or making a major campaign out of avoiding me—he was more professional than that. But our interactions since the Leviathan had been short and perfunctory. I hadn't asked him for anything more complicated than passing the plate of synthesizer gunk. Until now, because I wanted him with me in the Hrakert Rift Station the next day.

He could give me the best short-range blaster coverage of anyone in the party and he was our only real Republic presence; it was a rock-solid tactical choice. I'd repeated that line so many times in rehearsing the upcoming conversation that I'd almost convinced myself it was actually why I was asking.

Zaalbar was asleep in the main hold when I got back to the Ebon Hawk (I didn't blame him; the Jawa-sized bunks weren't kind to Wookiee-sized occupants), so I kicked my boots off there to avoid waking him and was just about to head for the cockpit when I heard Jolee's voice coming from the direction of the medical bay.

"—on the ship this whole time?"

"No, I've been in the city too, mostly the Republic embassy. I—uh, I was at the trial earlier too. Can't say I blame you for being too busy to notice me." Carth. "How do you feel? I mean, he was an old friend, wasn't he?"

Zaalbar was snoring as only a Wookiee can snore. I edged into the corridor just in time to hear Jolee's subdued response: "A great deal has changed in the past twenty years." Carth didn't reply, and the silence between them stretched out before Jolee added, "The investigation troubled me even more than the trial. It turned up some unpleasant truths. I would never had pictured Sunry as the type of person to get involved with a Sith spy."

This was when I should have done the polite thing and left, or at least knocked to ask Carth if he had a minute. I did have vague intentions of doing the latter when I padded silently over in stocking feet to stop right outside the med bay door.

"I keep thinking about his wife; how upset she was the whole time," Carth said. "Even though she knew he'd been having an affair with that Sith woman. She was just—crying." I could picture the gesture he'd be making, that perplexed way of raising his hands. "I mean, is—is that love? Just ignoring all the bad things someone's done? Overlooking all their crimes?"

I should have left, but I didn't. Instead, I leaned against the wall and listened. Another line to add to the list of non-Jedi-like things I'd done lately, I knew that. It was just—the sincerity of Carth's voice. I wasn't sure if it would ever extend to me again, and I wanted to hear it.

Inside the med bay, Jolee let out a quiet "hmph." "You can't simply decide to stop loving someone because they've done wrong, not if it's really love. All you can choose is what you do about it. What you can forgive and what you have to take a stand against."

"And she could forgive him." Carth and I both digested that, then he said, "I don't know if I could have done that, five years ago. Now I'd be happy if all my problems were that simple."

"Oh, you'd be wailing and gnashing your teeth as though it were the end of the galaxy. Relationships are just like wars; everyone always thinks theirs is the most dramatically world-shattering one ever."

"Yeah, well, I'm willing to bet most of them aren't quite this close to being right."

I could feel the bitterness coming off of him through the wall, which stung. Now that I was this close, I was able to pick out where in the room they were: Jolee sitting on the med bay cot, Carth standing in the corner by the door panel, half a meter away from me. I was holding my breath as I waited to see if either of them—the ex-Jedi or the soldier I increasingly suspected was Force-sensitive—would sense my presence, but if they did, they didn't react.

The ex-Jedi didn't say anything to that, and they lapsed into silence again for so long that I almost walked away before Carth began carefully, "You think if you…uh, care for someone enough, you can stop them from doing wrong in the first place? Keep them on the straight and narrow, so to speak?"

"Are you suggesting that Elora could have kept Sunry from having an affair if she'd loved him more?" Jolee's voice had a very familiar tone to it, the one that insinuated that he wasn't going to tell you outright that you were an idiot, but you should really reconsider your spectacularly ill-informed last statement.

"What? No—no, of course not. You know what I meant, old man."

I could hear the suppressed smirk on Jolee's face as clearly as I could have seen it. "You should be clearer about your statements. You wouldn't want someone to misinterpret them."

"That's rich, coming from you," Carth said.

"Quit talking back and let me tell you a story." Carth obligingly shut up, and Jolee cleared his throat and began, "Once upon a time, a man—and not a very old man, either, not as jaded as he thought he was—fell in love with a woman. They met when the ship he was on was destroyed and he crashed to earth, and at first the two didn't trust each other, but things changed. She was beautiful and strong-willed—you might even say stubborn, especially when she wanted to know something—and heh, could she ever fight.

"After they had been together for a while, the woman trained as a Jedi under very unusual circumstances. For one thing, she was much older than your typical Padawan, and her mentor was just a Padawan as well. And what's worse, there was a war raging, and before long she was tempted to leave the Jedi and fight against them. The man pleaded with her not to go over to the dark side. But even though he loved her more than life, he couldn't stop her."

Like most of his stories, it was rambling, cryptic and more than a little depressing. That this one was so obviously about me—and Jolee's lack of faith in me—only made my already-formidable need for a drink spike. Up until then I'd thought the conversation was just about Carth's paranoia, but now I had to ask myself if Jolee really believed I was going to fall again too.

"And that's what you think is going to happen to me?" Carth asked.

Jolee gave an irritated grunt. "You kids think everything is always about you, you, you. Has it ever occurred to you that you aren't the first one in the galaxy ever to lose your wife?"

Carth and I both stopped cold.

Later, after we left Manaan, Jolee would tell me the whole story of how he went against the will of the Council in training his wife as a Jedi, and how their making him a Jedi Knight after she fell to the dark side and was killed was what had led him to exile himself on Kashyyyk. But at the time, I didn't have a clue, and the offhanded way he acknowledged the story as his own made it even worse. So many things about him started to click together in my mind.

"I'm sorry, Jolee," Carth said from the other side of the wall, in exactly the same tone I'd used when he'd told me what happened to _his_ wife.

Jolee answered almost levelly, "What are you apologizing for? It's just a story, remember?"

I'm sure Carth didn't believe that any more than I did, but of course he didn't press it either.

"Oh, out with it," Jolee said. "You're itching to ask something; keep it bottled inside much longer and you'll probably make yourself sick."

"Why tell me this now? Are you suggesting that history repeats itself?"

"I haven't been suggesting anything; I'm just telling you a story. But I will say one thing: the time that man spent with that woman was the happiest of his life."

"I know what you mean," Carth said, so quietly I almost missed it. The sadness in the room filtered out and seemed to settle on everything around me like smoke. I let my head slump back against the wall and winced at the rustling sound my hair made on the metal. Of course he was still in love with his dead wife; like Jolee, he probably always would be. It said good things about his character that he hadn't forgotten her. And he and I had known each other for what, a few months and one night in a pilot's chair? It would be ridiculous to feel threatened, especially now that it was a moot point.

"You said earlier you have to know when to forgive someone and when to take a stand against them," Carth was saying.  
"Oh, so you _were_ listening. I thought the streamer of drool coming out of your mouth meant you'd fallen asleep."

"What did the man in the story do?"

I heard the sound of Jolee shifting on the cot, and when he answered, this time the grumpy old man routine fell away and revealed the core of sadness underneath. "He…didn't do either. For him at that time—for the galaxy, for that matter—falling to the dark side was a serious matter, not something he could overlook the way Elora forgave Sunry. At the same time, he couldn't hurt the woman he loved. And he refused to give up on her, right up until she died."

"Is that what love is, then? Never giving up on someone?"

"That's what the Jedi would say, if they ever straightened out their own doctrine. 'Everyone can be redeemed' and all that. Elora too, maybe."

"I asked because I wanted to know what you think."

"I think you can't define love and you shouldn't waste time trying. You either feel it or you don't."

_And how do you know?_ I wanted to ask him. It seemed like such a childish question at my age, but Carth already knew what it was like to be in love; he'd been married. I hadn't. The memories the Jedi Council had cooked up (or stolen?) for me weren't giving me any help, and if Revan had ever been in love (especially if Malak and I had had some kind of thing before Mandalorian masks and metal jaws had killed the romance, and if so, I _didn't want to know_), the feeling wasn't accessible to me now.

"What am I going to do?" Carth wondered out loud, thereby saving me the trouble of banging on the wall to ask the same thing.

"Why are you asking me? Figure it out for yourself!" Jolee told him gruffly.

"I was talking to myself, actually, but if you know, I'd appreciate it if you didn't hold out on me."

"Is that what you all think? That I have all the answers and I'm just too stubborn to give them to you?"

It was clearly a rhetorical question, but if I'd been in the room I would have had to admit, well—yes.

Jolee's voice was heavy. "I don't know a thing. I chose love, and I'd like to believe that it can help someone stay on the right path. But it didn't work for me."

And he'd spent the last twenty years carving tree trunks with his lightsaber and wishing it had. If I was tempted to go over to the dark side, would having Carth there stop me? I wanted to think so, but I also wanted to think I'd never be so tempted that I'd need intervention to hold me back.

"If I don't give you any real advice, Carth, it isn't simply because I'm an obnoxious old coot or because you should think for yourself, although both of those are true," Jolee said. "It's because I've been so deeply wrong."

Then with forced lightness, he added, "But if you decide you want to spend a few decades running from your problems, I know a lovely little place on Kashyyyk, assuming you don't mind a few kinraths."

"Can't stand 'em. It's hard to shoot them before they get close, and then they start trying to poison you with that spare leg on their face," Carth cracked, falling equally far short of actual levity.

"That wouldn't be a problem if you had a lightsaber. But since you don't, you'll just have to find your own way of dealing with things here."

"I know. Even if I wanted to run, we have a mission to finish. I'm going to see this through to the end—all of it."

"Then whatever you decide, your destiny won't turn out like mine, lad."

"At least one part of it will. We're in this together, old man," Carth said. I heard Jolee chuckle to himself almost affectionately. For a moment it seemed like they'd finally broken through the haze of angst surrounding them, and then Carth's voice came softly through the wall: "Damn those Sith. They destroy everything, don't they?"

"Not everything." The sadness was just a thin undercurrent in Jolee's voice again, but it was there. "Some things we do a good enough job of destroying by ourselves."

I'd heard all I needed to hear. Moving quietly, I went back to the main hold for my boots, tiptoed around a still-snoring Zaalbar, and decided to pass up the booze in favor of shutting myself inside the women's quarters to meditate. Being the ex-Dark Lord of the Sith, I reasoned, is kind of like being in love. You can't simply decide to stop it. All you can choose is what you do about it.


	17. Goodbye Party

A/N: Some catch-up: since the last story, our narrator has found the fourth Star Map, reconciled with Carth in Hrakert Station, finished up her sidequests, and crash-landed on the Unknown World, where she sided with one of the Rakata factions and got them to agree to let her into the temple. And we pick up there with an ensemble story.

By the way, I'm going to be posting a separate one-shot probably sometime this week, a take on FemRevan and Carth's relationship between the two KotOR games. The style is different from the Downtime stories and the tone is quite a bit darker, but if that type of story is your cup of tea, I hope you'll find it interesting nonetheless.

And as ever, I don't own KotOR or its characters.

* * *

"Goodbye Party" (Ensemble)  
Unknown World

* * *

We built a bonfire on the beach the night before I went to the temple. For me it had the air of a farewell celebration, although it's possible I was just projecting. The prevailing line of thought among the Ebon Hawk's crew seemed to be not that getting through the temple would be _easy_ for me, per se—not with the place crawling with Dark Jedi—but that it was something I'd be able to handle.

It wasn't the Dark Jedi I was worried about, or at least not more than one of them. Bastila couldn't shut herself off from me completely. I sensed her presence, close by, and it didn't take a big stretch to know where she'd be waiting for me. Or what color robes she'd be wearing when I found her.

I didn't tell anyone, which was a dangerous, self-serving call with the potential for very bad results. As with most people's first steps toward the dark side, though, my intentions would have been good. I was hoping I could talk her down, get her to come back with me and no one would ever have to know what had happened up there at the temple summit. I wanted to redeem my friend easily and quietly.

Until morning, though, all I could do was wait.

* * *

With that on my mind, I was restless as I constructed the fire pit—which actually drew a small, silent crowd of Rakata spectators on the overlook; you'd think they'd never seen someone move rocks with her mind before. I stayed long enough to get the dry palm fronds burning and then let Canderous take over while I went around to check on the rest of the troops.

Carth was on board the Ebon Hawk with Mission, looking over the replacement stabilizers she and Zaalbar had scrounged up while I was playing diplomat (sometimes with a lightsaber). So far Carth's role in this process mostly seemed to consist of frowning masculinely at things in an authoritative captain-like way, while Mission's was basically imitating him. T3 and HK, the ones who were actually in charge of fixing the ship, waited outside the engine room door and bickered. I managed to get the repair process moving and stayed around until I could confirm that we had everything we needed to get the Ebon Hawk airborne again. T3 assured me it would be all ready to go well before I left the temple. HK kicked him in the chassis. I decided this was Mission and Carth's problem and headed for the ramp.

Back outside, the sky was still a clear, intense blue, with a breeze that kept the palm trees rustling constantly in the background. The closer of the planet's two moons dominated the horizon like a huge pale ghost. It was reminiscent of Manaan, except that this world had a sharp undercurrent to it. This had been a place of darkness for thousands of years, and I'd had my own quantity to add to it the last time I was here. As I clomped down the ramp I pictured myself in full mask, cloak and armor, hugely overdressed for the beach and stalking around casting a big triangular shadow over the gizka. Darth Revan didn't look anywhere near as out of place as I would've guessed.

I took my boots off just to show I could, now that I didn't have a Sith apprentice following me around waiting for his chance to stab me in the back (proverbially or literally). The sand squishing up between my toes felt utterly alien. Good, though. If Bastila had been there she would have made some pointed remarks about all the potentially painful wreckage under the sand, but my well-being was probably not high on her list of concerns anymore.

I made tracks back over to the bonfire, which was blazing by then and sending out almost as much smoke as the Ebon Hawk's hyperdrive had been. The smell of charred reptile (amphibian?) wafted out, not unpleasantly, along with the smoke. Canderous had set up a makeshift spit with one of the spare swords and was cooking ten or twelve gizka on it. "Revan!" he called as I got close. "Turns out these things are a lot better when you roast 'em over an open flame. How many do you want?"

"I thought we agreed you weren't gonna call me that in front of the kids, Canderous," I said, nodding significantly toward the ramp, where Carth was emerging with water containers in hand. It occurred to me that maybe we should get the gizka meat carved before Mission came out, in case she was feeling sentimental. Vaguely I wondered if rancors were edible, and if so, what they tasted like. After a brief internal debate I decided against finding out. Getting an attack of food poisoning in the middle of fighting a Dark Jedi would not do wonders for my credibility as the defender of the galaxy.

"Trying to keep him from growing up too?" Canderous asked.

"Just trying to keep the peace." I readied a couple of withering comebacks in case a crack about knowing which side my pastebread was buttered on was forthcoming. Luckily it wasn't. It was hard to imagine that no one had picked up on the understanding Carth and I had reached in Hrakert Station—real privacy is a rare commodity on a ten-room freighter—but no one had acknowledged it yet, either.

"You're the boss." Canderous shrugged and bit into the leg of the gizka on the end, bones and all. "It could use some sauce. The blood of our enemies, maybe."

"You wouldn't."

"No," he acknowledged. That look he'd been getting every so often in the last few days came back, the one that meant he was thinking about Jagi again. "I wouldn't."

He shook himself out of it and neatly slid the cooked gizka off the sword and onto a broad, flat rock nearby before starting up the beach to rustle up some more. "I'm sure they'll be fine the way they are," I called helpfully after him.

At the rock wall a few meters in the other direction, Jolee was whistling as he cut fruit off a palm tree with his lightsaber. The shortest tree was probably two and a half times his height, so he was actually hacking away from the top of a boulder while Juhani darted around on the sand catching fruits as they fell. I could have picked the fruit with the Force too, but Juhani looked like the exercise was doing her good, so I left them to it. Sometimes there's no substitute for doing things the old-fashioned way.

The hulking brown shape on top of one of the boulders near Jolee's had to be Zaalbar, standing with his back to the beach and staring ahead of him. He'd probably scaled the rock, but I took the path up, carefully avoiding the space junk on the ground. Once I got close I saw what he was looking at: the view over the landmass, gray striated rock, bright green palm fronds, hulking metal shipwrecks in the distance, and looming over it all, the Temple of the Ancients. The next-to-last stop on our journey.

"The trees here aren't much to look at," Zaalbar commented dryly when I'd had a chance to take it in.

"You could always go for a swim," I suggested. Big Z snorted. "Or build a sand village. What are you doing up here, anyway?"

"Standing guard."

Not an unreasonable thing to be doing, under the circumstances, but the way he said it made me think he was expecting something. "Against what?" I asked. "The Mandalorians, the rancors, the Rakata, the Sith?" All of the above? The number of different factions trying to kill us was starting to get absurd.

He raised one hairy hand to shade his eyes from the rapidly-setting sun—still brighter than he was used to, either on Kashyyyk or in the Lower City of Taris—and peered hard into the distance before answering. "Maybe the planet itself."

I rested a hand briefly on his arm and went back down to the waterfront. I wasn't sure if the crew was becoming Force-sensitive en masse after being cooped up with four Jedi for so long or if the darkness was so strong it just slapped everyone in the face. Big Z hadn't been the first to mention his discomfort with this place, though. We were putting on a good show of being relaxed tonight, but it wasn't lost on me that I was the only one who'd taken her boots off.

* * *

It was almost dark by the time we all gathered around the fire and started dinner. The meal was just roast gizka, fruit and water, but between the salt air and all the fighting earlier, we attacked it like kath hounds tearing into a steak.

"It has been so long since I tasted fresh fruit," Juhani sighed once we'd slowed down enough to talk again. "I suppose the last time any of us has even seen it was on Dantooine." She took a delicate bite from the one she was holding and a faint smile spread across her face, the kind I usually associated with particularly enlightened meditation.

"It's true. One of the few good things about working for Davik was the food he had imported from off-world. We haven't had much to compare to it since then," Canderous agreed.

I made a face at them, although it was actually kind of nice to see them in such accord about something. "Hey, nobody ever said a galaxy-shaping quest meant good food. You two weren't even here for the all-pastebread-all-the-time leg of the journey."

"It has been good for us not to indulge ourselves too much," Juhani said quickly. "Nonetheless, when we have completed the task that lies ahead of us, I am going to pick or even buy an entire crate of fresh fruit, and I will eat every bite."

"Query: Will that be the full extent of your post-assignment functions, meatbag? I was under the impression that the long-term goals of organic meatbags were somewhat more…complex." Granted, I thought, HK's ideas of sentients were almost entirely formed on Revan and other people whose life plans included conquering the galaxy, so it was possible that his impressions were a bit skewed.

"It is…hard to say, with the Enclave lost. Perhaps I could help rebuild it, or perhaps I will join with Jedi elsewhere to continue my training. I would like to train a Padawan of my own someday. When I am ready."

"Just as long as you're careful how you test her," Mission said.

Juhani's answer was smooth. "I hope I will have the wisdom to test her in the way she needs to be tested, as my master did me. What will you do with your future, Mission?"

"I don't know. It's been kinda nice being around a ship like this. Maybe I could save up and get a freighter of my own, be a supply pilot like Jolee was."

"Technically Jolee was a smuggler," I pointed out.

"From a certain point of view," said Jolee, thereby proving that no matter what he said, he still had a lot of the Jedi left in him.

"Yeah, but a good-guy smuggler." Mission thought for a minute. "Maybe I'd even have a job for Griff…uh, assuming we kept our credits separate."

We went around the circle from there. Jolee the ex-good-guy-smuggler was still deciding, but I was surprised to hear that his choices included returning to the Jedi ("Those damnable old fools are going to need all the help they can get," was how he put it). HK-47 waxed lyrical about all the organic meatbags he intended to kill, starting with Yuka Laka and working his way around the galaxy until he'd sniped everyone who'd ever looked at either of us cross-eyed. I told him not on my watch and he sulkily revised his ambitions to getting a new flamethrower.

Zaalbar looked at me before answering; when I nodded, he said he hoped to go back to Kashyyyk to make sure Czerka was gone, then work with Mission for a while longer until he felt ready to lead his village. Canderous was going to continue his search for greater meaning in his life than wasting two-bit pazaak players for chump change. T3-M4 emitted a long, complicated series of beeps and whirrs to indicate his intention to replace HK's control cluster with a permacrete detonator. Obviously he was still mad about the stabilizers.

"What about you, Carth?" Mission asked.

"I can't say yet. Once the Star Forge is destroyed, the Republic might need me to help clean up the rest of Malak's fleet. But when the war's over, I'm going to Telos to find my son. And Telos itself will have to be rebuilt….I guess I'll have my work cut out for me." He hesitated. "But maybe I'll ask for leave for a while. Do some traveling." He was trying to gauge my reaction out of the corner of his eye without actually looking at me. It was about as subtle as a bantha stampede, but I felt a quiet surge of affection. I stretched my arms back casually; close to the ground, out of view of the rest of the crew, our fingertips brushed against each other. Traveling, huh?

"And what will you do?" Juhani asked, turning to me. Her face and her mind were both tranquil. I could still sense pain somewhere inside her, but since our talk it seemed like she had at least come to an acceptance of everything that had happened. I had high hopes for her Padawan.

As for her question, though, I didn't have a clue. I wondered if they really believed it would be that easy, just blow up the Star Forge and we could all retire.

If we could just get Bastila back, part of me would have been content to go on like that forever, the ten of us traveling the galaxy together and fighting the good fight. Two droids, a future Wookiee village chieftan, a Twi'lek street kid, a battle-hardened Mandalorian, a Cathar Jedi, an old hermit, a Republic war hero, a Jedi Princess and me—who would've thought a motley crew like that would become so close. Revan—I—must have felt this way at the start of the Mandalorian Wars about Malak and our Jedi comrades, before the casualties began and our ambitions became a lot less righteous. Now, as then, it wouldn't last forever.

"Oh," I said lightly, since I had to say _something_, "I think I'll take a vacation. Just point my ship in a direction that feels right and keep flying until I get somewhere where they've never heard of Darth Revan." Right, I remember thinking. I'd probably have to leave known space for that. "Or Deralia. I've heard good things." Closer to Telos. Also probably better drinks.

"Wait, aren't we forgetting something?" Mission asked. "There's gotta be some kind of big victory celebration, don't you think?"

Carth nodded. "I hadn't thought about that, but you're probably right. I imagine the Republic will want to reward us for our efforts."

"Well, duh. I bet there'll be a party all over the galaxy when the war's over."

"Like Republic Day?" Juhani asked.

"Yep. What do you think, huh? Parades, a bunch of bigwigs making speeches, ships all flying in formation…"

No, it came to me halfway down her list, no one thought this was going to be easy. Not even Mission. They were all trying to do the same thing I was: just keep up our spirits as we barreled on toward the end of our journey, one way or another.

"Don't forget the fireworks," I said with a smile, stretching out on the sand to look up at the darkened sky, where the Star Forge was waiting for us.

* * *

When I awoke at dawn, the fire was still burning. Everything around me had a reddish glow. I got up, dislodging something that had been resting over my shoulders in the process, and realized how many eyes were watching me—Juhani sitting up, Jolee bracing his back against a rock, Carth, Zaalbar. The others were close by too, both Mission and Canderous sleeping lightly: the first watch.

I looked down to see what had been covering me and found an orange jacket. It looked a little better in this light.

I wanted to tell them what I was thinking, how much they'd meant to me these last months. But there was no time for speeches. I bowed my head to them, knowing they would understand my feelings as clearly as my words, then pulled on my boots and started off alone. The Rakata were already waiting for me at the temple, and so, somewhere beyond them, was Bastila. I thought about bringing her a leftover gizka from the night's party, but they'd long since gone cold.


	18. Meditation

A/N: There's another—brief but significant—time skip between the last story and this one. As interesting a twist as it might have been for our Revan to fall at the last minute, she did indeed turn down Bastila's invitation to the dark side (and thus go back down to the beach for the little love scene with Carth).

I've had this chapter planned for a while, but I was working on it at the same time as "In Practice" (the darker Carth/Revan story I mentioned last week, which has since been posted), so in some ways this story is an answer to that one. I wanted to look at how an ongoing relationship between these two characters could actually work, while still acknowledging some of the challenges it would face. And as you've seen in previous stories, I love writing about the implications of party member choices.

I don't own KotOR or its characters.

* * *

"Meditation" (Carth)  
Star Forge system

* * *

"Bastila," I pleaded, "it's not too late. You can still give all this up. You can still come back to the light."

No, I thought midsentence, that wouldn't reach her; that would sound like a platitude and she'd laugh. It had to be an appeal to her reason. I backpedaled furiously and changed tack. "There's no future in this path. Even if you kill Malak, you'll spend the rest of your life in fear, sleeping with one eye open, always waiting for the inevitable betrayal. All for the illusion that the dark side is stronger."

_That _might sound like her idea of a good time. I didn't know what to say, how to convince her. I was on the wrong side of her battle meditation, and I could feel it in every limb. It was an overwhelming tiredness, like being badly injured during a battle and then stepping on a poison grenade. Or like being back in Saul Karath's torture fields. There's a moment there when even the strongest mind contemplates shutting down, but in this case, the feeling was continuous. Everyone had been right about Bastila—the best battle meditation practitioner of our age.

And Malak's apprentice. I wondered if it would sway her to be reminded of what had happened to the last guy who'd held that position. Hopefully stupid kriffing goatees weren't part of the job requirement.

I was losing focus. I centered myself for a second to push the desperation back down and tried again. "Bastila, you're—"

"Still rehearsing?" Carth asked, coming into the dormitory and letting the door shut behind him. He had the chestpiece of his armor slung over his shoulder and two ration bars in one hand. I'd sensed him getting closer, but I was so preoccupied it was like trying to make out speech underwater.

"Trying," I admitted. "Failing. You can't prepare for something like this."

"If you want to prepare, do it by eating something."

"Oh, okay, mother."

"I don't know about you, but I have a harder time wasting Sith on an empty stomach."

"Maybe they'll be so impressed by my asceticism they'll all spontaneously reform."

He handed me one of the ration bars, which I knew must have come from our emergency supply bins—the good stuff, at least compared to what came out of the synthesizer. I was about to object before I realized there was no point. One way or another, we wouldn't need them for much longer.

"Thank you," I said. He nodded; I took a seat on my bunk and peeled the wrapper off the bar. There was nothing visibly off about the way he was moving, but I could tell Bastila was getting to him too. Carth was in a particularly tough middle ground, with the Force sensitivity to feel the battle meditation more acutely but none of the Jedi training that could help him resist it. He seemed to be running on pure stubbornness.

"I just received a transmission from Admiral Dodonna," he told me, unwrapping his own meal. "The fleet's begun its assault, but they're having trouble countering the Sith and they've already taken substantial losses."

"They don't want us to join in?"

"Not yet. Master Vandar is sending a squadron of Jedi to join us in trying to get on the Star Forge and keep Bastila busy."

That was good on several levels: I was glad Master Vandar was alive, and the unexpected Jedi support would come in handy. I just hoped their idea of keeping Bastila busy didn't involve lightsabers.

"Is the ship on autopilot?" I asked.

"Canderous is in the pilot's chair at the moment. I'll take over again once the Jedi ships get close."

"Then have a seat, Carth. I think I promised you once I'd try to keep you in the loop."

He put the armor on the floor and sat down next to me on the bed, not quite touching me but almost. I bit off a big hunk of the ration bar. He did the same, and for a minute we ate the dry, dully fruit-flavored bars in silence, inevitably getting tiny crumbs all over the blanket. As military strategy meetings go, it wasn't exactly dignified, but we had bigger things to worry about than how we looked in the history holos.

"You're finalizing the plans for once we get there?" Carth asked.

"Yes. I'll tell the others right before we make our final approach, but we're going to do this the same way the Jedi did when they captured me, with a small strike team."

"How small are we talking here?"

"Three people. Same as always."

"You know, I don't think we have to follow that rule anymore."

"No, but the strike team should have support from Master Vandar's Jedi. We'll need everyone else to stick close to the docking point to keep our escape route clear when the bombardment starts." I finished my bar and dropped the wrappers on the floor by the foot of the bunk, where I'd remember to pick them up when I wasn't discussing critical strategies for the decisive battle of a galactic war. "Who should I bring with me?"

Carth raised an eyebrow at me. "Shouldn't you be the one to decide that?"

"You're the war hero, flyboy. Or at least the one who remembers being one." He graciously didn't point out that I had spent a significant chunk of my military career as something more like a war villain.

"Not Mission," he said first. "Not that she's not capable, but if anyone should get out of this safely, it's her. Zaalbar should stay with her too."

If someone had put a blaster to my head and demanded that I tell them what Carth's first answer would be, I wouldn't even have hesitated. I was glad we agreed so strongly on that point.

"Not the droids. It's too easy for Jedi to take them out, even Dark Jedi," he continued. I nodded, encouraging him to go on. "Not Canderous, either."

"Why?"

"Wishful thinking."

"And with that blaster rifle, it might be smart to keep him stationary, don't you think?" I asked gently. "All that ranged firepower in a concentrated area would go a long way toward holding the path."

Carth turned with a sudden, sharp motion to look at me, and I watched his expression clear as things clicked. I hadn't left this decision until the last minute; I had already chosen. What I wanted was for him to follow the logic himself so he'd understand my conclusion.

"Well?" he asked.

He already knew, and he also knew he wasn't going to like it, but I said it anyway. "I want you to stay with the Ebon Hawk."

Carth took in a deep breath and let it out. I could sense him turning it over in his mind, coming up with what I hoped were the same answers as mine: because staying at the ship would let him stay in contact with Admiral Dodonna and the fleet, because he was best equipped to get the Ebon Hawk away quickly once they started the bombardment, because his blaster fire would do the most good there. Because I trusted him to hold things together where I couldn't be.

"You said you'd let me try to protect you," he said, not accusing, just pointing it out.

"You know the good thing about being with a Jedi?" I paused to think about that statement. "I mean, aside from the Force bonding, the impressive physical conditioning and the romantic high-necked underwear. It's that we don't have to be next to each other to protect each other. Wherever I go, I'll be able to sense you."

He was silent as he absorbed that. At last he answered, "All right, commander, I'll follow your orders. But if things get rough, I'm coming for you."

His voice was so serious I even bit back the obvious joke about waiting until afterwards. "Thank you, soldier. I'm counting on you to make sure this whole crew is there at the victory party."

Somehow I'd migrated down the bunk to rest my head on his shoulder. We were quiet for a minute or so, and I concentrated on the solidity of him, his slow, even breathing. To say that that wasn't a Jedi-sanctioned form of meditation would be an understatement, but it helped stave off the exhaustion. I felt very awake, very alive.

"You've changed a lot, you know," Carth said all of a sudden.

"Yeah, it's the hair. I keep meaning to cut it, but it's been hard to get ten minutes together lately without someone trying to kill me."

"Well, I was going to say you're more serious and focused now than when we first met, but—" I speared my nails lightly into his hand and felt the motion in his chest and shoulders as he chuckled. "—it's more than just conviction. But I don't think you're simply becoming the same old Revan again either, even Revan before she fell to the dark side. I—I can't put my finger on it; I just have a feeling."

And I knew how badly he wanted to have it. I thought again about the Star Forge, the battle already raging nearby, Bastila the Sith, and whose fault it all was. "I can't promise I won't keep changing," I said, suddenly feeling compelled to make sure he understood.

"I know. But after what happened with Bastila in that temple, I'm convinced there are some things about you that won't change." Carth's fingers laced into mine. "And we'll take everything else as it comes."

This from the erstwhile king of trust issues. Wonders never ceased. I didn't think there was any way to add to that statement, so I just leaned closer, hoping he was right. What neither of us had mentioned was that beyond Bastila would be Malak; I could feel it as surely as I felt Carth next to me, or the ration bar crumbs being ground into my bunk. Like it or not, my past was going to catch up with me today.

"I'm picking up the Jedi ships. They're on course to rendezvous with us in about five standard minutes," Canderous' voice boomed over the ship's comms. My past was even faster than I'd expected. "After that it's a straight shot to the Star Forge, so if we're planning on holding some kind of briefing, we'd better do it now." He fell silent, then came back on again. "Or we could always just play it by ear and shoot anything that moves. I'm open to possibilities."

Carth and I exchanged glances, picturing that. "I'd better go do that briefing," I said quickly.

"Yeah," he agreed. "I think I'll take back my chair."

He got up and reached for the chestpiece of his armor, which was still on the floor. I picked it up first. I was remembering the time I'd held his armor for him, after that awful Sith party on Taris, and something told me his thoughts were running along the same lines. The weight of it in my hands was comforting. It wouldn't stop a lightsaber, but hopefully several centimeters of plating and Carth's marksmanship would keep one from getting close enough to test it.

Carth bowed his head so I could reach up and slide the armor down over it, settling it on top of his shoulders. His body shifted just slightly under the weight; the already straight military posture drew up into a battle stance. He lifted his arms, and I moved around him to work the reinforced clasps on the sides of the armor—first his left, then his right, my hands brushing over his torso in places where the next touch would come from enemy fire. The red plating shone in the dim light.

All over the ship, I could sense the others doing the same thing. Pulling on boots, choosing armor, strapping on energy shields, loading their equipment pouches with medpacs and stims, holstering blasters, clipping lightsabers to their belts. Even with Bastila's battle meditation weighing down on us, the upcoming battle was calling out like a living thing, and the crew of the Ebon Hawk was getting ready to meet it.

Carth leaned forward and pressed his lips to my forehead, just once. He picked up the circlet I'd taken off when I'd moved closer to him, and settled it gently back on my head with both hands. Then I felt his fingers moving over my collar, straightening my robes—the simple brown robes of a Padawan. Because that's what I was.

I picked up my lightsabers (the ration bar wrappers could wait) and we headed toward the main hold. At the end of the corridor he stopped me and said, very quietly, "Just one more thing. What are you going to do if you can't get Bastila to stop using her power?"

It was the question from the Leviathan come back to haunt me, the question I'd been asking myself since the temple. If it came down to it, would I kill someone I cared about to end the war?

I realized then what it was, the difference between Revan and the person I was now. Revan was a master of cutting her losses, of making strategic sacrifices in order to advance her goals. Of giving things up. Sometimes that's necessary, in war as in life. But I'd come to think that some things are too precious not to be saved—and the reasons have nothing to do with strategy. If love is never giving up on someone…

"She saved me, Carth," I said. "I'm going to return the favor whether that prim, bossy, stuck-up little princess likes it or not. And while I'm at it, I'm going to save the rest of the Republic too."

And when the time came, I'd just have to trust the Force to guide me toward the right words.

His face broke into a grin, with a warmth so tangible I could carry it into battle like armor. "Then may the Force be with you."

"May the Force be with you," I echoed, and together we went off to win a war.


	19. Coming Back

A/N: I'm so, so sorry for the long delay, but here it is, everyone—the last chronological chapter of Downtime. I tried to keep the sappiness at a dull roar, but what can I say, I love the Bastila/Revan friendship and I'm a sucker for happy endings.

HOWEVER, this series isn't over! If you've enjoyed it so far, you might want to put it on your story alert list, because I'm planning to add in a few more stories in the weeks to come. In the works right now are a story about Carth and Dustil at the Sith Academy (since Lilan wanted more of that) and another about the infamous slumber party that so traumatized poor Bastila. I'm actually up for requests too, so if there are characters/locations/scenes (canonical or otherwise) you'd like to read more of, let me know in a review or message. I can't promise I'll do everything, especially if there are a lot, but I can definitely try to tackle what I can.

Once again, thanks so much to all of you who've been reading (and especially reviewing). I've had a wonderful time writing these stories, and knowing that other people are enjoying them too has just been icing on the cake. From me and Revan, may the Force be with you! :D

* * *

"Coming Back" (Bastila)  
Unknown World

* * *

The nine-person (well, seven and two droids) victory party was in full swing when I went out to find the missing guest. I set off without actively looking for her; just let my sense of her guide my feet until I ended up where she was—a ways down the beach, still just in sight of the Ebon Hawk. She was sitting on the sand with her bare feet in the path of the waves. If she noticed the tide was coming in and drenching the hem of her sleeping robes, she didn't seem to care.

"Didn't feel like getting dressed up to go out?" I asked.

"I couldn't decide which color robes to wear," Bastila said with a wry little smile, like she was talking about a fashion dilemma instead of an existential crisis.

I was going to tell her she was missing the party, but of course she already knew that. She'd come out here to distance herself for a reason. So I just kicked off my boots and sat down next to her. It was a while before either of us said anything; she seemed to be looking for the right words and I didn't want to push her. The water washed up our legs and backed away, soaking up the long white skirt of my robes and drawing goosebumps out on my skin until I got used to the coolness. The stars overhead were as bright and clear as the flare of a lightsaber.

"You and Carth," Bastila said eventually, breaking the silence. It wasn't a question.

"Yes," I answered.

"I suppose I don't have much room to lecture you about the perils of the dark side anymore."

"Lecture away. It'll have more weight now that we actually understand what we're talking about instead of repeating other peoples' lessons."

I'd been planning for that to sound wise and worldly. It came out harsher than I'd intended. Bastila flinched, just barely. "Would it change your mind?"

I took my time replying, but I knew what I'd say as soon as she asked. "No. I'm not going to give him up, Bastila. I'll have to accept whatever that means for my future with the Jedi."

"I had a feeling that would be your answer." Her resignation was obvious, but I couldn't quite tell from her voice or her mind if she approved of that choice. She stretched her legs out and leaned forward on them, studying her hands as she talked. "Master Vandar and the Council on Coruscant will certainly frown on it, but it's possible they'll be lenient in your case. I don't imagine they're in a hurry to drum their prodigal knight, the savior of the galaxy, out of the Order. I could offer to try to intercede on your behalf…"

"Would you?" I hadn't expected that from her.

She nodded. "Whatever I might think about it personally, after everything that's happened, I could stand to do one thing simply as your friend. But I'm afraid my interference might do you more harm than good now."

Her logic wasn't entirely lost on me, but it was another thing I wouldn't have predicted she'd say. "Why? Everyone can be redeemed," I reminded her. "You don't think the Council will welcome you back? Even with that Cross of Glory you're getting tomorrow?"

"On the face of it, I do think so. Certainly that would be the prescribed way of the Jedi. But as you saw yourself with Master Vrook, there will be so much suspicion to face, so much distrust. I'll be closely watched, as you have been—a valuable but dangerous asset." She kept her voice neutral, but I felt the tinge of sourness underneath. Sending me out to convert half of Korriban, she'd always made redemption sound so easy—which it would be, for perfect Jedi. You renounced the dark side and boom, you were okay with the Order again. It wasn't often I heard her suggest that there might be Jedi authorities who were less than perfect.

"Is that the dark side talking, or you?" I asked—not trying to lead her, just wondering what she thought.

"It's—" Bastila faltered. "It's hard to say. Once you've seen things from that perspective, it's difficult to forget completely what you've learned. They're right not to trust me. Even if they do, there are many in the Republic who won't be so quick to agree." Pensively, she picked up a handful of damp sand and let it run through her fingers to drop heavily to the ground. "Perhaps I could prove myself in time, if I were strong enough. If I could be sure that I'm good enough to go back."

"Bastila, you passed through the fire and came out on the other side. As far as I'm concerned, that makes you the best of the Jedi, not the worst." She looked at me like I'd suggested she consider a career in the lucrative field of nerf herding. "Okay, admittedly I've never been known for my adherence to the letter of the Jedi law—"

"You are a master of understatement. But it means more than you know to me to hear that reassurance from you nonetheless."

She paused, like she was deciding whether to say something, and then went ahead with it. "I never told you in so many words how much I admired you when I was younger."

"You did?"

"Malak too, but especially you; everyone was always talking about how promising you were. My Battle Meditation hadn't manifested itself yet, and I used to dream that one day I'd be able to do something that would set me apart as well." Bastila stopped playing with the sand and brushed it off her hands so meticulously I got the feeling that it wasn't the only thing she would've liked to clean away. "When you left for the wars, I suppose I took it personally, perhaps even more than most. It was such a…a repudiation of all of us. Of everything I had thought you were, everything I wanted to become—a great Jedi. I didn't think I could forgive you for that."

Little Bastila, getting doused with a bucket of water every time she got mad and wishing she could be more like me. I couldn't picture it. There was a lot I wanted to ask her. With so many Jedi gone, she was one of a handful of people left who could tell me what I'd been like before the wars. I didn't ask her anything, though—not then. There'd be time for all that later.

"It's ironic," she said in a softer voice. "All that wishing I'd become unique and powerful, and now I find what I want is simply to—"

"What?"

"—to be connected, I suppose."

I could sense the quiet fear in her. I felt it the way I would've felt the coldness of her body if she'd lain down in a snowdrift—it was permeating her skin the same way. The Sith don't see the Force as a connection the way the Jedi do; everything Malak must have taught her would have been based on the idea of isolation, a solitary battle toward a height that doesn't leave any room for bonds. It had shaken her. I wondered suddenly if her mother was still alive, if they were even close enough for Bastila to realize it if she died.

"You are," I said. "Whatever happens with the Jedi and even the Republic—whether you decide to go back or not, whether they accept us or not—we're part of the crew of the Ebon Hawk. You'll always have that. And there wasn't one of them who didn't believe we could save you."

"How, though?" she asked. For a second, her voice sounded like a child's, asking to hear a favorite bedtime story again. "How could you be so confident?"

"No real self-respecting Sith wears pigtails."

She grimaced at me. "I was hoping for something a bit more affirming than that."

"Because I know you, Bastila. So do they. There's a light at your core that refuses to go out, whatever Malak thought. You just needed someone to hold up a mirror for you."

Bastila didn't react physically at all to that. Her gaze stayed where it had slipped earlier, off into the distance again. If we hadn't been bondmates, I would've thought she hadn't heard me. But I could sense her turning what I'd said over in her mind. It was like she was trying it on to see if it was true.

"Has it been difficult?" she asked. I didn't have to ask what she was talking about.

I took a long breath of sea air and exhaled slowly. "Yes," I admitted. "Even just the crew all had so many ideas about Revan, all these things they wanted me to be or not be. At first I felt paralyzed by it—all that history."

"And now?"

"I've been coming close to it for a while, but it didn't click all the way until Malak said something to me, just before he—before he became one with the Force. He told me that he alone had to accept responsibility for his fate. It was a moment of clarity for both of us, I think. I can't change the past, and it's not enough just to say, 'Revan's dead, I'm someone else now.' I don't think my destiny's over with yet. I'm going to make Revan into the kind of person—the kind of Jedi, I hope—I want to be. And all I can hope is that the trust of the people who matter will follow."

At the time, I was just talking, not sure if I'd be able to back up the speech I was making. But in hindsight, I remember that as another moment of clarity: Bastila's trust would follow. Carth's would follow. So would the crew's. Even when they didn't understand me, they would trust me—and although I didn't know it then, that trust would sustain both me and the galaxy during the long years ahead, until I finally made it home again.

Bastila said, "There's something else about your past I should tell you." Her gaze was direct now, focused. "I named you."

I stared at her.

"I wasn't very involved in the—the 'reprogramming' process; I didn't have enough power or knowledge of the world to be able to give you your memories. But they let me choose your name. I didn't know why at the time; in truth I still don't. Perhaps the Council foresaw things I could not about our bond. Or perhaps they felt allowing me to participate in some way would put me more at ease with what we were doing to you." The wry smile was back.

"Why did you choose—"

"It's your real name, before you were called Revan. Well, your first name is, at least. I had to press the Masters to use even that; it was taking such an enormous risk in revealing your identity, even though no one had called you by it in years. But I wanted you to have something of who you once were, even if you wouldn't know it."

My name. It doesn't get any simpler than that, but I felt—I'm not sure how to describe it. And I wasn't sure how to thank her, until I remembered I didn't have to. We could sense the things about each other we didn't have words for.

"We've really come full circle in the last year, huh?" I said. "You redeem me, I redeem you…"

She nodded. "And we rely on each other to show us who we are."

"Also I saved you from Brejik," I pointed out, just in case she'd forgotten.

Miss High-and-Mighty Force Pushed me sideways into an oncoming wave. I ate a mouthful of wet sand and seawater and gave her a shove of my own. Her high, clear laughter rang out over the soft wave-and-wind noises of the beach like a bell. Was it just me, or did this place feel lighter now than the last time we'd been there?

We sat up at the same time, wiping muck from our clothes and hair, and she said my name. My real name.

"Yeah, Bastila?"

"I'm going to wear my suit at the celebration tomorrow. The red and peach one."

"Good choice," I said.

Bastila's own clothing—the armor of a Jedi who had redeemed a Sith Lord and saved the Republic. I'd always known she'd go back.

"Hey there!" Mission's voice called from down the beach. "Dinner's done, so come and eat already before it gets cold! All we're waiting for is you two!"

I twisted to look at the ship and saw them—Mission on the sand with her hands still cupped around her mouth, Carth a few steps behind her with his warm grin, the others on the ramp and in the doorway, Juhani, Jolee, Canderous, Zaalbar, even HK and T3. If I concentrated, I could catch the scent of hot food on the breeze, calling us home. Maybe T3 had finally fixed that damn synthesizer after all.

"Shall we?" Bastila asked, with a smile no Sith could ever have produced.

"Yes," I answered.

I stuck out a hand, she grabbed it, and we pulled ourselves to our feet. Then we started back together toward the lights of the Ebon Hawk, where our friends were waiting for us.


End file.
